Maximum PC

A few months ago I purchased a Chaintech 7NJS motherboard and have not had a complete system since. Onboard raid was a joke, and I was having "complications" so I broke down and baught the Highpoint RocketRAID 1540. After many-a-reboot I have found there to be a conflict between the Audigy and RAID array. If everything is plugged in, the computer will either say the disk(RAID arrary) needs to be checked for errors and hang, or it will just reboot if i skip the process.

I have stripped computer down to these two cards and swapped them arround so there are no INT channel conflicts in the bios. I gather this to be some type of driver problem because the OS will boot with both cards plugged in, sans hard drives. Once I plug in the hard drives however, endless reboots. The drives themselves are fine because if I unplug the Audigy everything is smooth as butter.

I have updated the RAID bios/driver and Audigy drivers with no luck. Why for this happen to me?

If your motherboard has onboard sound, did you disable it in the bios? It will cause problems with the Audigy card if it is enabled.

I have disabled it in the bios and I have disabled it through the motherboard jumper. I have also disabled the onboard raid and every other feature it would let me disable.

That doesn't necessarily mean everything is disabled though. Allow me to entertain: when i first recieved the board there was no onboard raid bios appearing upon boot. I sifted through the main bios to find the mysterious enable/disable option i was reading about on the internet. I figured i was either blind or i had recieved a decoy board because it was nowhere to be found. Naturally I attempted to update my bios but every bios i downloaded was not for my board. Turns out that all the many times I downloaded the bios it was currupted because i was finally successful, about a week later. same download link, same floppy disk. But low and behold, there was now an option to turn on the "onboard" RAID, which was disabled by default with no way of turning it on.

my complications where then prolonged by the two 36GB Raptors that where bleeding to death upon arrival. I created the array using el cheapo aforementioned promise onboard raid only to have my system hang upon format. After another week of farting around I decided to purchase the RocketRAID 1540 because I could not use Western Digitals diagnostic utility on the drives because they where being filtered through Mr. Promise, thus not being recognizable by the utility. By the time I recieved the new raid card one of the drives had begun makeing a horrid, godawful niose and I was affraid (heh, af"RAID") it might explode, sending shards of glass and metal through the two 80mm fans at 10,000rpm. so that one was a good candidate for an RMA. Also by now, windows would not boot with the other drive plugged in. So i ran the dos utility on it only to find that the SMART status claimed it was also in the middle of rapid decomposition. As I type the new drives are on their way but i think I may have gotten off-topic so i'll stop now as you are already aware of my current dilemma.

Does your case have sufficient cooling?

Does your Power Supply have enough power?

Double-check that all cables, connections, and pagan sacrifices are correct.

Well, to answer your questions:

4 case fans (2 intake infront of drives, 2 exhaust rear and up) and an Antec Truepower 430

But its a moot point now as I have everything playing nice together,... I think. Turns out there was some threeway action messing with my head. The fantom onboard raid was the instigator. It was sharing an INT channel with my raid card but I had thuk the INT resource to be part of my raid card. I now have the Audy in slot 2 and the RocketRAID in slot 4.

Thanks Nastyman and deject for the feedback, much appriciated