This morning, my PC (purchased last October) refused to boot WinXP Professional, "hanging" and rebooting when it reached the "agp440.sys" line in Safe mode. I checked with Microsoft and tentatively identified the problem as a consequence of my recent upgrade to WinXP Service Pack 2, so I prepared to run the Recovery Console, boot to Windows, and uninstall SP2. Then I encountered another problem. I can't get the Recovery Console to let me repair WinXP -- i.e., to disable the "agp440.sys" process that I think is causing the problem. I boot with my OEM recovery CD and give it my "RAID driver" disk in drive A, and all seems to be going well. I choose "R" to repair my WinXP installation, and then I get a blue screen of death when WinXP tries to read my HD: "A problem has been detected and windows [sic] has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer ... "Technical information: *** STOP 0x00000024 (0x001902FA, 0xF7CA9B70, 0xF&CA9870, 0xF745783D) *** ntfs.sys -- Address F745783D base at F7446000, DateStamp 3d6de5c1" This looks like an HD error, and the error message would like me to run chkdsk /f, but I can't get a DOS prompt anywhere to do this, since WinXP apparently can't read the drive with the RAID driver. Do I have a bad RAID driver? Is my RAID setup corrupt/broken/incomprehensible? My system specs: P4 2.8C GHz (478P) GA-8KNXP Motherboard ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro 1 GB DDRAM 2 x 250 MB Maxtor HD in GigaRAID RAID 1 array (IT8212 chipset) Any advice will be appreciated.

I don't have a solution, but a similar experience on 3 occasions led to me being able to recover the system once, but on the two other occasions everything that I could think of failed and I ended up booting from my XP CD, doing a clean format and reinstall, everything worked fine again. My error message related to the quite common unmountable_boot_volume BSOD. Heard and read quite a lot about problems installing SP2 but I've installed it on several computers with no problems so far. Not much you can do in my experience if you can't reach the C: prompt. "Don't eat yellow snow" Martin

I don't have a solution, but a similar experience on 3 occasions led to me being able to recover the system once, but on the two other occasions everything that I could think of failed and I ended up booting from my XP CD, doing a clean format and reinstall, everything worked fine again. My error message related to the quite common unmountable_boot_volume BSOD. Heard and read quite a lot about problems installing SP2 but I've installed it on several computers with no problems so far. Not much you can do in my experience if you can't reach the C: prompt. "Don't eat yellow snow" Martin

That agp440 is your video driver. I am surprised you can't just come up in safe mode which loads the defaulf vga driver. What does your onboard raid controller say? Everything synced and happy? Is this mirrored or striped? Striped would be bad if there was a serious drive/disk error. If you can't get in under RC you can start install and do a repair. It will keep everything you already have but you will have to redo your service packs and updates. Might be just what you want:-)

Thanks for the replies. Blessedly, my array is mirrored, and after several hours of tech support, I learned how to use one drive at a time to find the one in which the startup file (prob. agp440.sys or one near it in the boot order) was not corrupt. So now I'm backing everything up before I rebuild the RAID 1 array ... but WinXP SP2 is running fine on 1 HD.