We are working with a site that has just installed a new server. They
tried to install Win2003, but had "BIOS problems", so ended up rolling
back to Win2K where everything appears to be stable ...

Except, we are seeing problems that look to be related to the DOS:
driver in the FSI ... maybe. That is my (not so) educated guess based
by what I'm seeing in a WHERE command.

Anyway, it looks like somehow a process (randomly) will get thrown to
the system monitor, and within a minute or 2 we have "slush" as the
whole system "dies". My suspicion of the SATA drives was raised when I
was eventually told why they hadn't installed Win2K3 (with an Adaptec
1210SA controller), but our problem could obviously be "anywhere" (I
know there have been problems with network cards in the past)

In normal operation system seems to be fine. Only seems that things
start going off the rails when they start using programs that push the
DOS:/OSFI driver "hard" - which of course may be coincidence ....

Anyone want to share thoughts &/or experiences offline, send to rossf,
c@re of stamina.com.au

I would personally be very concerned about a "new" server that won't run
Win2k3...

Could possibly be a faulty disk cache memory or simply a firmware problem on
the sata controller - it sounds very much like the caching/queuing problem
of some description.

The Adaptec card you are using is a SATA Raid card - is it configured using
Raid? If so I would double check the RAID config.

Don't know how "old" the machine is, but the most recent bios version for
the card is v 1016-m2 which was released on the 23rd Nov. It seems to be
solving problems with using the card with some Inter chipset motherboards -
it is "minimally tested" which suggests a serious problem which occurs
regularly!!!

The actual OS drivers seem reasonably static so it's probably not that
causing a problem.

I would suspect motherboard/card incompatability (especially seeing the
adaptec support site and the fact that it doesn't appear to support win2k3).

Worse case, (and easiest to test) - just swap out to another make of SATA
card and see whether the problem goes away!
Regards
Simon
"Ross Ferris" <rossf (AT) stamina (DOT) com.au> wrote