Dramatis Personae:
DFI Lanparty UT Expert SLI (nforce4 chipset) - Mother Board
(2) WD 80Gig SATA drives in a RAID 0 Array - The Twins
WD 150Gig SATA drive - The Big Brother
Trojan Vundo - The Troublemaker
Norton Ghost 9.0 - The Reluctant Hero
Windows 2000 OS - The Veteran
Spare HD - The Sidekick

ACT 1 - The calm before the storm

As you may have seen me recommend before, my setup is running everything on a RAID 0 array and backing up the array on a separate drive. The setup has been working for me ever since I started building my own machines... until two weeks ago.

ACT 2 - The storm

My rig contracted a minor annoyance that proved to be extremely difficult to remove... the trojan loader called Vundo. As I was running a firewall and virus scan, I don't know how it slipped in under the radar, but after infection the trojan didn't do any damage other than have an annoying popup every time I turned on the computer and at random intervals while running.

ACT 3 - FEMA-like repair efforts

Since I've been using Ghost for a backup of the array (and thanfully I had just backed it up a week before infection) I figured I just do a restore. I pop in the Ghost CD and boot it up into the restore console. I hit F6 to load the raid drivers like you do when installing XP. The load continues until it's almost complete when I get "nvraid.sys not found".

NOT FOUND?!?!?! I loaded it when I hit F6.

What do you mean not found? It's right there on the A: drive!

LOOK!

So I reboot and check out Google. Well it turns out that Ghost 9 & 10 have problems with the nforce4 RAID chipset. One of the solutions was to slipstream the Ghost disk with the nvraid drivers. After a couple of incomplete attempts, I finally get it to work... the slipstreamed disk boots fine.

BUT IT STILL DOESN'T SEE THE ^&*($ing ARRAY! Now what?

Since ghost does see the array once in windows, I figured I'd jack in a spare drive, put an OS on it, load ghost and restore from there. Sounds good. And since booting from the Ghost CD saw individual drives, I'll just restore windows from the backup. I figured it shouldn't be a problem since the hardware and drivers should all be the same. Simple. Man I love it when a plan comes together.

I root around in my closet of spare parts and find a drive, unplug one of my DVD drives and plug it in. When restoring from the image from the Ghost recovery console, the drive letters don't always match what they do in windows. It did boot, but spare drive was C: and since the array was drive I:, there were lots of problems as all of the programs and drivers were looking for an I:.

Strike 1

So then I try to do a fresh install of the OS from my disk (which happens to be an OEM XP disk but with a valid M$ license FYI). So I start this process, but the OEM disk for some unknown reason decides to intall everything on I: as default. And you can't rename the drive you boot from, so that doesn't work.

Strike 2

I get another flash of brilliance and decide to load up W2K rather than XP. It boots up, but doesn't see the array either, despite having loaded the drivers and clearly seeing the RAID controller in the hardware list. Perhaps it needs some update or other. I try to go to the interweb... and it can't as the network drivers aren't installed. So I download the drivers from the machine at work. I install the network driver, which gets me internet access, but the unified nvidia driver requires DX9 to run. And for some reason the windows installer 3.1 wouldn't install from the internet, and therefore I couldn't use windows update to download.

I then remember that DX9 is loaded on game install CDs, so I pop in BF2 and install Direct X.
It then lets me install the nvidia drivers. It works! The new drivers let me see the array.

I run Ghost...

I restore the image to the RAID array...

IT WORKED!!!

I'm back running virus free and it feels good.

ACT 4 - Finale

So boys and girls, when you upgrade, don't pitch all of your small hard drives and old OS disks. You just may have a need for them in the future.

And when the roommate/wife/girlfriend/life partner nags you to clean out the closet, you load up this post and tell 'em to step off.