As a mostly poor guy in college I have to say as an owner of a system built around socket 939 I feel totally screwed over.

I love Gigabyte because I've never been screwed over by them. However they failed to make a SLI 16X chipset because of AM2 which forced me to find a different vendor much to my displeasure. My original AGP system...

AMD 3500
Gigabyte K8NS Ultra-939 (best AGP board EVER period!)
2GB DDR-400 (disabled VM)
ATI All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro.

At an AIW 9700 Pro I considered the X800 AIW though it's record with Oblivion just did not justify such a short ended and relatively expensive upgrade. nVidia's latest AGP offerings were the equivalent to a slap in the face to any AGP owner. Also I got my motherboard just around the time SLI came out.

The upgrade reason is because even though the AIW 9700Pro kicked total ass about five years ago I simply can't play Oblivion at 1024x768 with anything turned on! Also I decided after a couple of drive failures to run XP on a Raid 1 (it takes me about four hours to undo the default f-ups with windows like the GUI, search panel bs, disable VM, clean out the start menu, install twenty browsers (I'm a Professional Web Designer) and so much more.

I feel screwed by three hands specifically. The problem I am having now follows towards the bottom.

First AMD's decision to switch to AM2. They will be moving to DDR3 in only a year anyway so there is absolutely no point to changing their socket! My 2GB of DDR-400 works just fine for me thanks!

Secondly nVidia for short handing us on SLI-16X. It came way too late in the game and there are only four motherboard that have the chipset. Epox's board is retarded, Abit's layout stinks, I RMAed my Asus board THREE TIMES and they still sent me the dam thing back (used, not mine, not working).

Thirdly I blame Asus. They held a monopoly on the chipset. Sure their board rocks conceptually but I never got the dam thing to work! Here was the issue...

I can not boot or run XP's install from Raid 1 with USB enabled.

I can boot or install XP and have USB enabled with Raid 1 if Windows is not running or being installed to Raid 1.

Honestly I got the two 120 drives to get around XP's inability to be copied and pasted like 98 (loved being able to merely copy the Windows directory to a second drive without the need for Raid, I run without VM so I don't have to go in to the folder itself to select all but the PF).

Anyway I'm running an EVGA motherboard with the SLI 16X chipset. I eventually plan on upgrading to an FX-60 and adding a second video card for SLI. I still can't get Raid 1 to work! The raid program was never included on the CD! There is no way to download the raid program (though I am able to copy it from the Asus CD and have it sitting on my desktop).

Regardless I used Disk Director to clone one of the drives to the other. I thought this would allow the system to boot Raid 1. Apparently cloning a drive does not include the boot sector (or whatever it is specifically). So it doesn't really clone the drive now does it?

I just want to get Raid 1 working between these two drives. I get unable to boot messages and have tried switching which SATA cable each drive is hooked up to in order to see if there is any way around not being able to boot. This is probably a boot sector issue where Disk Director failed to clone that part of the drive though I'm not completely sure. I do not want to do a software raid as I like having a 43MB load when XP is done loading.

Any advice? Anyone else go through hell with their AGP to PCI-E upgrade or go through RMA hell where the vendor totally kept screwing with them?