Thank you all for the suggestions. It was particularly helpful to get
Jun Qian's information about having large partitions since that rules
out that as the cause of problems. However, I am fairly certain that the
IDE to SATA adaptors are not the problem

Here is what I have:
Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard with 512M Samsung PC2700 DDR RAM and 2.4GB
Processor
The board has a Silicon Image SiL 3112 SATA RAID controller
The drives are a pair of Western Digital WD800JB 80G with 8M cache
Two Iwill I2S IDE to SATA adaptors connect the IDE drives to the SATA
controller
Drives are configured as a RAID 0 stripe set and partitioned as a single
drive
The partition is formatted to NTFS with Windows XP Pro SP1 - formatting
was done during installation while booted from CDROM

As long as power is on, there is no problem in accessing the disk and no
corruption has ever been noted. My earlier comments about CHKDSK showing
errors were explained and verified by my testing to be caused apparently
by open files during the test. If CHKDSK is run on startup, or from
booting to another disk there were in fact no problems.

If I go through the shutdown sequence where power is automatically
turned off after shutdown, I get system file disk corruption almost
every time - some sort of errors every time. So far, CHKDSK has been
able to repair all such errors. If I just turn off the power or go
through a restart process and turn off power before it reboots, no
problems.

The board does not have a setting that I can find to disable the power
off at shutdown, nor can I figure out how to install XP to include APC
options - there is no such tab in my installation. Some have indicated
that I could do a workaround to force such an install, but that seems a
bit convoluted to me and I am trying to get Intel to help me.
Incidentally, the SATA RAID drivers that Intel supplies are NOT
Microsoft certified so Micorsoft would not be willing to help - if they
ever do!

Peter
-----------------------------------------------
The NoSpin Group
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-----Original Message-----
I know there is something that you may not want to hear, but I did a bit
research today, and also from our own database (at work), I found that
there are problems related to HDD adapters (I remember you said you use
a SATA adapter), there are similar problems (eg data corruption) related
to IDE-to-SCSI adapters, and rare laptop to normal IDE adapter.  Could
you try to remove the adapter and try again?

To answer one of your question, I build system with big HDD on daily
base, 200G single drive or 400 RAID ain't rare for me (max to date near
2TB single NTFS partition), and none data corruption what so ever
(unless hardware failur / software corruption) on either win2k or XP.

Jun Qian
------------
Can you give us details on the motherboard, raid controller, and hard
drive(s)? I think you should be able to change a setting in the
motherboard so your system would require pressing the power button to
turn off. Your solution to restart and turnoff the power before it
restarts will work as well but that can be a pain to time it all right.
I wonder if it's the cache on the raid controller that isn't flushing or
the cache on the hard drives?

Mike

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