[Tristan]

I'm hoping someone on here will be able to help, as this one has me completely flummoxed...

I've got an ASUS A7V8X motherboard with a built-in Promise SATA RAID controller. There are currently two drives connected to this, and I also have another HDD attached to one of the regular IDE controllers.

I should point out that I built this system myself a couple of months ago (though the M/B is from an older system), and when I turned it off last night, there was not a single problem. It was running *perfectly*.

So imagine my surprise today when I turned it on to find that it wouldn't boot up. In fact, it wouldn't even get as far as trying to get into Windows: it froze at the POST screen, just after checking the IDEs. So I went into the BIOS menu and reset the config data to defaults. No joy. Okay. I changed the RAM with some I had spare. No good. I removed all PCI cards except the graphics card. Still didn't work.

Now, the A7V8X BIOS has a built-in flashing utility. I could get into this without any trouble, so I fired up someone elses PC and downloaded the latest BIOS (which was the same as the one installed, but what's the harm?). It flashed perfectly well, but didn't help. In desperation, I downloaded the latest beta BIOS, which *still* didn't help.

Then I did something that, with retrospect, I should have done at step one: I used the jumper on the motherboard to clear the BIOS memory. And voila: Windows was booting! A freak occurence, I thought, that had been fixed. Not so: it does the same every time I reboot, requiring me to take the side off the case and mess about with the jumpers.

From what I can tell, the ASUS BIOS is working perfectly well: the problem is when it hands over to the Promise BIOS for the RAID controller.

I'm pretty au fait with computers generally, but I don't have the slightest clue what could have caused this, or how to fix it permenantely short of getting a new motherboard. Any and all ideas will be gratefully received, because at the moment I'm having to keep the thing switched on 24/7 (which, given that it's in my bedroom and contains a total of 6 fans, isn't going to do a lot for my sleep).

(I'm also backing things up just as fast as my DVD writer will burn!)

Thanks in advance,

Tristan