John,

There is no need to install the Highpoint driver as the first action when installing Win7. That is only required if you want to boot from the raid which makes no sense to me. This would be different if you were to use a 4 disk raid10 like Steve does, but in your case, forget it. Just install Win7. When installing Win7 do not worry about the Highpoint not having the correct drivers. First get your DVD and BR recognized. If that has succeeded, you can install the Highpoint driver and if that breaks the DVD/BR devices, at least you know where to look.

I took your question to heart and have updated the spreadsheet with legends. Look here:

See, I knew this would happen. I broke your machine....

I'd follow Harm's advice. The whole AHCI before OS thing I think has to do with MOBO SATA ports only, and shouldn't be related to your controller card, I think.

Haha, that's great Harm - explains it perfectly!

Steve,

You definietly didn't break my machine! I am very grateful for the help! I am kind of relieved that I can just go back to zero. My only frustration is that on that drive I had a list of all the services that I could afford to cull and still have total necessary functionality.

NB: Interestingly, culling those services produced amazing speed increases in all day to day operations on the computer... but... as far as the PP4 BM... no gain whatsoever for the processor intensive tasks...

All right, time to go back to zero!

After this, I promise to take it easy on my mahines so that you guys can have some time off! I owe you more than I can ever repay!

Hm... maybe it IS time for a Mac, after all.....

Nah.

Haha, gee I hope not. I don't want to learn all this stuff again.

Although things like this tempt me:

This may amuse you. As I installed Win7 on the editing machine with AHCI enabled, it took aaaaaages. Like, an hour plus, compared to the usual 15 - 20 minute install. Never the less, all goes fine right up until the Enter a User name and Computer Name screen, at which point the screen flashed repeatedly, maybe 5 times a second over and over forever, preventing me from typing anything, because with every refresh, the cursor position reset to the center of the screen. I couldn't do anything!

So, I had to press reset. Luckily, upon boot, it took me to the "Setting up your computer" screen as though the reset had never happened.

As for the drives... All of them there except the HD DVD/Blu Ray Combo drive and the Highpoint RAID drives...

First of all, I have an IDE DVD Drive which is fine and from which I installed Win7.

As far as SATA though:

1. C:\ system HDD
2. D:\ hot swappable HDD
3. E:\ internal back up HDD
4. F:\ E-Sata back up HDD
5. J:\ SATA Blu-Ray Drive

But...

6. Blu-Ray/HD DVD Combo... not shown in Disk Management but is in Device Manager as "This device cannot start"... Any ideas?

Highpoint RAID isn't there yet either but I'll install the drivers and I'm sure it will appear.

EDIT: First thing that happened after using Windows the first time: Windows took about 1 minute to tell me it had downloaded updates and needed to restart. I clicked RESTART NOW. It shut down, booted up, got to the Starting Windows screen, with the brightly lit Windows logo on the screen... and sat there... and sat there... and sat there... five minutes went by... and it sat there... and I almost pressed reset.

But finally, it started Windows... and there was my Blu-Ray/HD DVD drive - there was my 2.7TB RAID 0!

It just worked!!!!

I am so happy I could kiss you guys!

I'm now about to go about fine-tuning it as per Harm's guide on the Adobe forums.

EDIT: Ok, initially I thought these long waits on the Starting Windows screen were because of significant updates to the system... but it looks like I'm stuck with them. Every time I reboot, no matter the reason, even if I just click Restart straight after booting... it takes five minutes plus to get into Windows from that screen - at least! It just sits there saying "Starting Windows" for ages. It's interesting that, as I said earlier, the same thing happened with the installation. It took ages, where usually, installing Win7 is a pretty snappy process.

Ok, so the looooong boot problem seems to be caused by all the discs being plugged in. I remove them prior to boot, boot up takes seconds.

The trouble is... if I do it that way and then try to add them once Windows has loaded... too bad. This is strange, since SATA is supposed to be hot-swappable. Weirder still is that the ones I leave plugged in for boot-up, when I unplug them whilst running Windows, it can take up to a minute for their icon to disappear from My Computer - and in fact it's still clickable for that whole time!

So my next challenge is how to treat each of these drives in the BIOS. Do I enable them (not all of them appear) so that an ! appears next to them?

John,

Try this as well:

# Go to Windows command line with administrative rights
# Type:
vssadmin list shadowstorage to see the current allocation.
# To change it, use:
# vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]
# I recommend using 1% of your boot drive, so for a 500GB drive I would set the maxsize to 5GB, and keep it the same even on larger drives:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=5GB

Maybe this will also help.

Will do. What does it do exactly?

Also, I did it fine for C drive. D drive gave me grief. And I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to put this shadow storage on each individual drive or all of them on c drive. I'm not sure if I follow correctly.

Shadowstorage is used to store system restore points. It is pretty large by default, but usually you only need a couple of restore points if at all, so this wastes quite some space on your disk. By reducing it to 5GB you have enough space to store around 5 different restore points before the oldest one is being overwritten by a new one.

Likely only your C drive has shadowstorage allocated. Not your D drive and you don't need to allocate room on the D drive.

For further info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754968%28WS.10%29.aspx

This is sort of off-the-wall and probably isn't the issue, but you might go into your BIOS on startup and look at the boot order. Sometimes things get mucked up and the system spends ages looking for Windows on every drive but the correct one. I actually had this problem with an external USB drive that somehow got inserted into the Boot order.

John, I don't know how you are keeping it together. I would have thrown my pc out the window by now, or maybe even....bought a Mac.

Here are some thoughts:
Have you run MemTest overnight? Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool (http://www.memtest.org/)

Have you checked your power supply?

Have you tried the HD DVD/BR drive on ports 1-4 or another working PC?

Here are some ideas:
Get an external 5.25" USB enclosure for the HD DVD/BR drive
Get a simple PCI Sata card for a couple of the drives

On a different topic:
John, what power supply are you using and does it have only a single 8-pin CPU power cable? If so, how did you get around this? (I ask because I just read that using Molex-to-8pin CPU power cables in a dual-CPU pc can be bad for the CPU)

Sometimes I do want to chuck them all out and just keep my day job.

The hard discs/drives are all working fine now I'm glad to say.

Haven't run MemTest - I've never really had any reason to doubt the RAM. Do you think I have one?

Regarding the PSU, that's a good question. I had a guy do the installation of the MB and PSU and CPU into the case for me. Now he also put in the RAM, but put them into the wrong slots, so it's possible he's done something funky with the PSU too. But honestly, I got him to do all that because my knowledge in that area is very weak. I've built a bunch of computers now - but all of them have had the MB and PSU connected by someone else, because I don't know what I'm doing. How would I know if they are powering the CPU appropriately?

I have an Antec TPQ-1000 1000W TruePower Quattro ATX & EPS 12V Power Supply, Modular Cables, Four 12V Rails, 80Plus Certified, 2x8-pin PCI-E, 2x6-pin PCI-E

Ok - one more problem down... my drive was being weird because of AHCI being enabled in the BIOS. But I couldn't disable it - that would mean all the other problems would come back.

So I reinstalled my old Si3112 SATA controller and it now runs the BluRay/HD-DVD drive.

The Loading Windows screen time is very short now. Thank goodness.

In fact now, with the Highpoint, the Si card and the six SATA ports on the MB, that's 12 SATA devices in total I could have connected! Maybe that can be my next project...

John, glad to hear things are working out.

According to newegg, your Antec PSU has 1 4pin and 1 8pin 12v CPU plugs and a dual Xeon motherboard requires 2 8pin plugs. I had read that you should be able to use a standard Molex to 8pin adapter, but I recently was asked the question of proper voltage being supplied to the CPU using an adapter. I am not an electrical engineer so I don't know the answer. I would assume the adapter should be fine because Molex to PCIe power adapters work just fine and they supply close to the same power for the 8pin plug.

You really should run Memtest (Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool (http://www.memtest.org)) just to be sure. I had very odd and random problems due to a single bad stick.

One of these days I'll get around to running Memtest.

This power issue you're talking about (which goes right over my head) - how would I know if the board/CPUs are being powered correctly? What do the connectors you're talking about look like? I'm familiar with Molex plugs and the plugs to power GPUs, which I assume are they Molex to PCI-E adapters you mentioned. But I'm nervous that it could have been done wrong...

From 1st PC Corp.

Model Number: CB-4M-8F
"This 12" long cable adapter converts a molex 4-pin from a regular ATX power supply to either a P4 ATX 4-pin or a EPS 8-pin female by combining the dual P4 ATX 4-pin. This dual use cable adapter is black sleeved as well."
http://www.1stpccorp.com/Images/CB_underpower/CB-4M-44F.png

Model Number: CB-4MP4-8F
"This black-sleeved power cable adapter converts a P4 ATX 4-pin female to a 8-pin EPS female connector. Cable length is 6 inches"
http://www.1stpccorp.com/Images/CB_underpower/CB-4MP4-8F.jpg

Model Number: CB-6M-44F
"This Dual-Use cable adapter converts a PCI-Express 6-pin to a EPS 8-pin, or a P4 ATX 4-pin, which is then plugged on to a motherboard. At 12-inch long and black sleeved, this cable adapter is very functional and looks sleek."
http://www.1stpccorp.com/Images/CB_underpower/CB-6M-44F%20web.png

The power issue goes over my head also, so, I suggest calling a reputable system builder who deals with dual-CPU systems on a regular basis and see what they say.

The disks:

Ok, after hours of Googling and trying to solve the problem of the portable SATA drives not disappearing from Windows Explorer even after they had been disconnected and powered down, I found and downloaded a program called HotSwap from here (http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm#download) which allows me to deactivate the drive before unplugging it. This was imperative as I had a drive get corrupted by removing it, thinking that no data was going to/from it. Luckily it was a backup, because there was 270GB worth of footage on it!

Now I can be sure.

The power:

As far as I can tell (and I'm not too switched on when it comes to this stuff, all of the power connectors come straight from within the power supply and go straight to the motherboard with no adapters.

Also, looking at the motherboard manual, it looks like all that is required is one 8 pin (plus the other stuff). Am I right?

You are totally fine and I think this confirms the use of Molex adapters. I looked at pictures on newegg to confirm, and there is the 8 pin above the top cpu and there is the 4 pin + Molex you pointed out. Because Supermicro builds a server class board like this, then its certainly ok for boards without the molex connector.