Since Monday, my PC hangs for like two minutes on the RAID Configuration screen when I turn my PC on for the first time on a day (after being off for many hours). If I reboot, it takes the normal two seconds.

I use a RAID 0 setup with two 300GB HDDs, my RAID controller is an Intel ICH8R/ICH9R SATA RAID Controller.

My specs and that are in DxDiag.txt

It was working fine before and now suddenly this begins happening from Monday, if you need more information let me know.

Thanks in advance.

Note: I'm not sure if this is a hardware or a software problem, so I put it here.

sounds like it might be a hardware problem, or BIOS. if there's a newer version of your BIOS use them.

The other thought is that it's an issue with one of the drives and it's having a hard time coming up from "cold" run thorough disk checks on them and see if they have anything wrong.

If this is a RAID 0 I'd suggest you start baking up data, whether it's your controller or drives, if either fails* you might lose the array and lose data.

*Raid arrays will only be recognized form the same chipset they were created on. If your raid controller goes out you wont really be able to recompile the array unless you replace it with the same controller.

I updated my BIOS as suggested by my friend, to Revision A06, which is the latest, did nothing to solve the problem.

What disk checks do you mean? I have done CHKDSK where I set it to automatically fix file system errors and scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors, this took about an hour. There were no problems there either.

Ok, since it won't let me edit my post, il say this: If I press CTRL-ALT-DEL when the PC begins to hang on first boot, it reboots and then loads with no hang, even though I didn't let it hang and load up the first time.

There are other non windows diagnostic tools. Try the manufacturers disk tools (on their website, usually not hard to find) and just google "disk daignostic tools".

The problem has appeared to fix itself, It didn't hang on first boot today.

But I will use the manufacturers (one is Seagate, one is Western Digital) disk tools anyway.

Thanks for your help.

Ok, the problem has come back.

The manufacturers disk tools weren't much help since the two HDDs are recognised as one by Windows.

I updated my RAID controller driver to latest, didn't fix the problem. Would a reinstallation of the OS fix this? Because I was thinking of doing that anyway.

I don't understand it, both HDDs seem perfectly fine, the RAID configuration screen said status is normal. I am using the PC with the problem as I speak.

are you using this PC as a server of some kind? if not why do you need to enable RAID.

if you really have to enable it, then i would buy two HD from the same manufacturer with the same amount of disk space

I bought the PC from Dell and it already had a RAID 0 setup with two different manufacturer's drives. The PC originally had Vista, I changed it to XP like the same day it was delivered to my house.

The RAID 0 setup with these two different manufacturer's drives has been perfectly fine for ages now (I bought the PC in February). Both drives do have the same amount of disk space. I prefer it to be RAID 0 than split up.

Also, I'm not using the PC as a server, just for general use like playing games, music etc.