to system partition or not to system partition

ok i started up in safe mode and it seems to be crashing at classpnp.sys>??

It's begining to sound like there is a problem with the drive :/

But, to simplify things when you do clean installs, unhook all other hard drives including any cards stuck in card readers or thumb drives. That can cause stupid install error messages or funky drive letter assignments.

But when it syas there is no "system partition" it's talking about the windows root/boot partition (Not the 100 Meg system reserved partition). If you did a clean install and then rebooting gives you that error, it's either the BIOS not finding the drive you just installed onto, or somehow the drive is not in the BIOS "boot sequence". Or it's a bad cable, flakey power, bad drive or something like that.

I'd try to start from scratch. Unkook all other drives, look at the motherboard manual and find out what is sata controller #1 and plug the drive into that (Don't use any specialised ones like the marvell controller, just the standard intel one). Make sure in the BIOS that the drive shows on on boot and that it is selected first in the boot order, DVD drive second. Then reinstall clean (Besure to delete and recreate the partition when reinstalling).

Then after thats done if there is still more random flakiness then it's some kind of hardware issue :/ Besides what I meantioned above it could also be the MB or power supply when all is said and done (I just had a total nightmare PSU issue that took days to wade through).

hi wishmaster, i do have 2 ocz vertex ssds. i had them installed as raid before and had no problem at all.
but ive now split them apart and using them on the individual boxes singularly. and now im running into these problems on only one of the boxes.. my intel box. the amd installed fine and seems to be solid in its stability by comparison.

i was able to install fine when ihad the drive set up as AHCI as u just indicated... but there is 6 sata ports and i have only one setting for all of them i believe. i cant set up one of them as ahci and the rest as raid?? or can i?

If you change your BIOS drive settings you will have big problems!

You CAN change from AHCI mode to IDE without a problem, but other changes will cause you a lot of headaches.

There is a trick to changing IDE to/or back to AHCI

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci

set "Start" to 0 .

Re-boot and set BIOS to AHCI.

Once the machine is running install the original AHCI driver. You may also have to alter the "BOOT order" of your discs in the BIOS if the machine fails to boot.

It is not normally possible to install a RAID configuration after an OS installation, ( although it will work on some Gigabyte boards, these boards also allow "mixed operation" of types, and later RAID additions).

Further information;

How to recover a RAID 0 disk array after losing the array

For data recovery;

FREE Freeware Data Recovery Software Full Versions

Regards....Mike Connor

Please post back a screenshot of your maximized Disk Mgmt drive map with listings, using Snipping Tool in Start Menu. Tell us what is on each partition.

Be aware that we see a steady stream of RAID install problems here. Better to install to a single HD plugged to SATA1 and use other HD's for storage unless you know that you can improve performance on Win7 with RAID - as most report no performance increase, and no real redundancy since you can lose everything with one HD fail in many RAIDs. Win7 built-in drive imaging is better redundancy.