My wife is the gamer, she had a computer built to her specs. In short, it has 5 hard drives in a linear config, it runs on XP pro, she loads all her games on drive "L" but it recent started to crash and would not complete the reboot. We could boot it in safe mode and do a system restore to a safe point. We took it in twice to a tech, 2 different techs, but it never gave them trouble while they had it. She then reloaded her games on drive "C", things went along pretty well until last night. She loaded a new game on drive "C", played for a while and it completly crashed. Now it will not boot past the raid window, so we can't even get to the point to run in safe mode.

All the techs around us are out until after the 1st, I would like to get her gamer up for the holiday vacation days.

Any help? Thanks
Alan

Not too sure if I can help but I know that I always install my games on another partition.

For Windows Vista I am running a 500 Western Digital SATA

I partitioned it to:

160gigs for Program Files (Drive C or in this case Drive F)
372gigs for Gaming (Drive G)

Once formatted I then created a folder called Games; so therefore if I were to install EverQuest 2 we will say I will put it like this:

G:\Games\EverQuest 2

Or if I were to install NeverWinter Nights 2; it would read

G\Games\NeverWinter Nights 2

In the same case if I were to install Norton Antibot it would be:

F:\Program Files\Norton Antibot

Well but anyways I've always been able to play the games without any problems.

I also have another 500 SATA Western Digital Hard Drive for Windows XP so that way I can dual boot; and again it is partitioned as well.

I'm not too sure what to say but maybe its how you have it set up? Maybe the system cant handle it? Have you ever called the manufacturer of the Hard Drive?

hi alanh, welcome to SAF

I assume by linear you mean striped? Raid 0 is it is known?

If so, this has no redundancy, and as it sounds like your having some Hard Drive failure, I hope you have some good backups available!

To the best of my knowledge, you need to remove the non-functioning drive, and start afresh with the remaining drives. I would advise checking them out also, I know SpinRite is well respected for its use on HDs.