Faulty RAID Controller? or strictly the work of the devil?!?!?!?!

System:

Gigabyte GA-&DPXDW Mobo (400W PS)
ATI Radeon 8500 All In Wonder (128meg edition)
Generic 4 Port 1394/Firewire Card
Generic 56k winmodem
Generic 1.44 floppy
Genius Netscroll + mouse  - though I was going to say Generic? :)
NEC MultiSync LCD 1700V
Altec Lansing ATP3
USB Intel Web Cam
USB Handspring cradle
USB Orinoco Client Gold (Wireless 802.11b adapter)
USB Cable for Sony Digi cam (used only when d/ling pics)
1 - AMD 2000+ MP (the other CPU fried and has been removed)
2 - 512 MEG DDR REG ECC
2 - Western Digital 120GIG SE HDs (7200 RPM)
1 - Maxtor 160 GIG HD (5400 RPM)
1 - Lite-On 48x24x48 CDR
1 - Toshiba DVD ROM
1 - Panasonic LF-D321 DVD-R/RAM


The rest of the components being used are onboard NIC, Sound, RAID etc,.

Let the fun begin......

I bought this system from newegg.com in July/Aug online and had a friend bring it down to me (I'm currently living in Mexico).  I have built MANY systems in my day having worked at a computer store for a few years and also building systems for my friends/customers/myself.

Originally when I built the system, I did not have the 2 - 120 gig drives or the DVD-ROM.  I DID have 2 cpus, and a 40 gig drive in the box at the time.  From day one things were horrible, the system was EXTREMELY unstable.  Crashed 2/3 times during the install of XP.  Finally when I did get it to boot up, the mouse I was using at the time (logitech mouse man wheel) stopped working, I swapped it out for another one and things seemed ok, except when I would reboot.  If I rebooted the machine, it would hang booting windows, or would keep rebooting itself right at the part when the XP logo should come up.

This seemed to be pretty consistant.  I let the system stand a few minutes one day while I went to get a soda or something...and when I came back and hit the power, it booted fine into XP.  I loaded the drivers for the AIW Radeon and was prompted to reboot again.  I grudgingly did so and was greeted shortly by desktop.  Cool, problem solved I though, I adjusted my resolution to 1280x1024 and all was well.  I went about installing some of the other software I was going to need and was prompted for a reboot by something.  I rebooted and came back to the desktop, but my settings were reset.  So I changed to desktop back to 1280x1024 and again software reboot blah blah, reset settings.  This kept happening over and over, so for some reason I decided to change the mouse to the boring Genius I got going on now.  After the reboot the desktop was good, so to make my life easier, I left that mouse and away I go.

I come back after a few hours to find that the system was turned off by a power failure in the town.  Let me tell you this much, where I live (Playa Del Carmen, MX) there is ALOT to be desired in clean, steady power.  There can be as many as 20-30 power failures a day at times, so to find the computer turned off was no surprise, and no I don't have it plugged into a UPS.  I tried to turn the computer back on, and the reboot at the XP screen or hanging loading the desktop started all over again.  This went on for a while, if I left the system it was fine, if I rebooted (or the power crapped out) then I had to let it "sit" for a while, never the same amount of time.

I chalked all this up to a crappy power supply and decided for the time being, I'll live with the issues.

A few weeks later, I had time to pursue these problems. I started researching the PS specs and found out it is well within the specs by AMD and the Mobo manufacturer.  The system seemed to be very stable when it was running, so I didn't think the CPUs were having problems running together. I started looking into the ATI card as a source of problems, and found a few people were having issues with the Radeon 8500 series and some motherboards etc,. This somewhat seemed to apply to me, but none of the resolutions that I tried seemed to help.  I looked into BIOSes, PCI cards, drivers and anything in between.  Although several issues are known with some components, nothing seemed to help until one day.....a few weeks after all this went down, I noticed that Gigabyte posted a BIOS update for my board (F5) I jumped all over that, and upon flashing the BIOS, ALL MY PROBLEMS WENT AWAY!!!!!

I was finally going to be able to slap the taste out of Divx....now if only I had more hard drive space

I made the decision to get some of the fastest hard drives around.  The Western Digital 120gig Special Edition 8meg cache mofo.  These things were meant to live in the blue aluminium fortress that my intercooled, fuel injected, turbo AMD 2000+ MPs have been terrorizing.  With a lovely dose of 240gig in a RAID 0 setup, things would be great, no?  Sure they would! Made the order and a few weeks later someone was muling their way by customs.

I chose a glorious sunny day to stay inside and work on my system.  I threw in the 120giggers, removed the 40gig drive that was in there COUGHFRIEDACPUCOUGH, and rearranged masters and slaves so many times I felt like I should have been wearing the "gimp" outfit. Wanted to get everything just right.  I created my RAIDness and loaded up XP.  This time EVERYTHING WAS FINE!!!! WOOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!!

Now, the real fun part....the system seems stable, until I try to move alot of files around.  If I select a ton of files to oohhhhh say, backup, then the system will selectively crap out with KERNEL_INPAGE errors, PAGE_FAULT, FASTTRACK.SYS erros (which is the RAID card)on a regular basis.  Let me tell you what a pain in the ass it is to try to backup files and have your system die on you.

The only thing making me lean towards the RAID card, is there have been some people reporting on storagereview.com of strange behaviour with my WD drives and RAID cards.  Nothing this serious though.

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?!?!?!?!?

I have tried all kinds of drivers, I have moved around PCI cards, prayed to the gods and nothing will fix this problem.  My next solution will be to break the RAID partition, make the RAID controller a regular IDE controller (jumper does this) move the WDs to the regular onboard IDE controller and move the rest of my crap to the "old" RAID ports.  

I wanted to post this question to see if anyone has a better suggestion as I'd like to keep the RAIDness going on.  I am now writing this on a fresh install of WinXP and I'm still having the same problems with the moving of files.

BTW I bought the mobo refurbished :) I purposely left out this little tid bit of info until the end because I don't want everyone saying "Get a new mobo" it's extremely hard for me to get parts down here, and they're about 35% more expensive than the States.  There is also a VERY slim chance they'll have a Dual AMD MPX based board anywhere around here.

And for those that are unfamiliar with the "gimp", rent Pulp Fiction.