Help needed on Abit IC7-MAX3 mobo

[okietex]

I had a user do a ms windowsupdate today and updated the following: monitor driver, video driver, intel silicon image update.

The machine is running on Windows XP Pro SP1, on an ABIT IC7-MAX3 mobo, 1gb (2x512) ddr ram, ATI Radeon 9600 video, audigy2, running 2x160 gb Maxtor SATA drives.

Here's what happened ... after the updates, we rebooted the machine and now all fun starts:

1) got 2 GPFs, 1 said realted to "Radeon" video card
2) went to the video drivers and reverted the video driver to the PREVIOUS (rolled-back) video driver (on the primary monitor)
3) Rebooted after that ...
4) Booted up just fine ...
5) Looked at hardware/system specs and noticed that under video/monitor that the RADEON secondary adapter had the "newer" driver listed... so, you rolled-back/reverted to previous driver on this one too.

6) Rebooted ... and all has gone to POT!!!

7) Can't seem to boot to WinXP Pro SP1
8) Updated BIOS from 1.2 to 1.5 for the IC7-Max3
9) Nothing has helped so far
10) tried to boot into SAFE-MODE (all types) and we get "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partion(1)..../system/system32/drivers/..." and a whole bunch of sys drivers etc...
11) But, when we try to boot up into "Normal" windows XP, we do get the WIN XP booting logo and partial information and it looks like it will boot BUT it just restarts itself and goes back to the boot in SAFE-MODE screen etc.

as with anything like this, we tried many different things that I have forgotten and trying to get BIOS back correct etc. It seems to be but no dice.

So, anyone got ideas? We are pulling our hair out ... Not sure how to get drives back and with data ... I did try seeing if I could get the drives to re-calculate themselves but there's no choice to do that either. We're definitely hosed right now - not sure how to go on after this.

Ideas?? Please!!

thanks. -ot

 

[arkus]

Boot from WinXP CD and choose repair installation?

<A HREF="http://forums.btvillarin.com/index.php?act=ST&f=41&t=2765&st=0#entry21597" target="_new">My Rigs</A>

 

[okietex]

thanks for the suggestion arkus ... but no dice. as far as i know, we've tried all we could.. so, i eventually went down the re-intall path on another drive.

but, the wildest has happened:
1) put new hard drive in system and got WinXP loaded
2) got data off of one of the RAID1 drives and copied it over to make sure I have data secured
3) loaded up and got RAID1 as my secondary drives and all is working....

---- then ----

4) I went this morning and tried adding another IDE drive as a slave to my master and what-do-you know... the RAID1 drives booted up for some reason.

5) So, what's crazy is I never could get those booted up since doing those winupdates/driver updates/removals yesterday.

6) But, system is still flaky acting and trying to figure out that and seeing how I can get drives to be correct in BIOS and boot up right.

Not sure about this but dang, it was/is a mess...

thanks for all suggestions - appreciated.