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XP locking up at home screen

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by mtcoll28734

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I have a computer in my shop that occasionally (every third or fourth boot) locks up at the desktop. I'll get the icons and the cursor, but the taskbar, cursor, and keyboard are locked up. I've disabled all non-microsoft services. I ran a registry cleaner, albeit not RegCure. It found and cleaned a boatload of errors.

This computer has what appears to be a RAID 0 setup. When I tried to do a Windows repair, I got "no drives installed", or words to that effect. Could the RAID driver be causing the problem? Any other ideas?

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by brian

When you do a repair install on any RAID device, you need to load the RAID drivers at the beginning of the setup from a floppy diskette by pressing F6 as XP is starting to load setup. You can find the drivers usually on the manufacturer's website and unzip them to a floppy. It is possible that it is a hard drive starting to fail (download "The Ultimate Boot CD" and run the hard drive checking utility on there). If they pass, and you are able to repair windows, it could be a faulty RAID controller, which results in replacing the motherboard w/ an identical one and identical raid ctrlr, hoping that the RAID BIOS see's the RAID is present between the two disks and continues on, or you will have to recreate the RAID. By doing this, you will end up breaking the RAID, resulting in a loss of data. MAKE SURE YOU CREATE A BACKUP OF ALL DATA BEFORE TRYING ANY OF THE ABOVE. When working with RAIDED systems, it is always hard to tell what will happen when you start messing with the windows installation and hard drives/RAID controllers.

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