hello everyone, been reading up on different posts here hoping to find an answer to a very nasty problem ive been having for 3 weeks now... anyways....this is the situation....P3-450MHz on a MSI mobo.(MS-6156BX), 196MB(PC100),asus agp vid, 3 x 18,4gig Atlas III 10rpm, adaptec AAA-133U2 RAID controller and onboard sound...for over 3 weeks now ive been attempting to get a clean load of win2000 on it. .. whats happening is that for whatever reason somewhere midway through the installation everything halts..let me try to explain in details whats going on: At the moment ive have configured a RAID 5 on RAID channel 3 and ive a plextor bootable cd-rom at RAID channel 2 for a bootable installation from cd-rom. the system starts pretty good everything is detected correct ..ram, cpu, RAID controller, cd-rom, disk drives and so on... after the detection of all the 3 disk drives and the cd-rom the installation of win200 proffesional initiates. I press F6 during the start of the installation so I can add my mass storage device driver (AAA-133U2 controller), I go through the process of installing the driver (I got the updated version from adaptecs website) with no problem at all. The installation continues a few minuttes and then..everything halts..In the lower left corner of the blue installation screen there is a text saying "Setup is starting Windows 2000" ?? at this point the cd-rom spins down and halt approx. 1 min starts spinning again and then stops completely ??...when I use the word setup above I am not sure if is is the correct word..I mean it seems like I only reach to the hardware detection level - I never reach so far that I get any windows dialog boxes...at the moment I am mostly worried about the installation in terms of the SCSI setup which I think is done completely after the book..I am using LVD cabling with a terminator in the end (I am carring all 3 disks on one LVD cable, the one that was included in the retail box from adaptec), the cd-rom is terminated on its own 50pin SCSI cable also from the retail box), the controller is having SCSI id 7 on all channels, the 3 disks in the array having id 0,1 and 2 (ive tried changing id but the manual prescribes id 0 and up).. moreover Ive exhausted all other options in terms of hardware errors as far as swapping out vid.card. & memory., disabling all kinds of things within the mobo. BIOS and the RAID controller BIOS., upgrading the mobo. BIOS. upgrading the RAID card BIOS., changing RAID channels between channel 1, 2 & 3., changing arrays (ive tried RAID 5 and RAID 0)., ive put in an ide disk drive and installed win 2000 prof. with no problems (so the cpu, motherboard, ram is working perfect in this environment), ive scanned the disk drives for bad sectors..but with no results, low level formated the array..as mentioned before the SCSI BIOS, jumpers on the disk drives is done in line with the AAA-133U2 manual. Most of the jumpers are not active - only the jumpers affecting the SCSI id, termination power set on the last disk in the chain and a jumper called ds is set on all disks. Concerning the mobo. it has to be PCI rev. 2.1 and it got to support busmastering (that should be ok I guess..how should I be able to make an array then..). I am not so much aware about how to check memory settings and irq settings if this could be the problem ?...im at the end here and really hoping someone can help me out 
..... thanks in advance to all u pc gurus out there.
..... thanks in advance to all u pc gurus out there.
