WinXP BSOD w/Intel ICH7R RAID10

[idata]

Recently, my Windows XP Pro SP3 machine received an auto-update from MS with KB979683, which contained a new kernel (ntoskrnl.exe). After that, my machine rebooted to a BSOD with Stop: 0x0000007B (0xBA4CB524, 0xC0000034, 0, 0) which typically means that the OS could not access the boot HDD. Previously, my machine has been running great with a 4 HDD RAID10 array, using Intel ICH7R (82801GR controller), v5.0 Intel Option ROM, v5.7 iastor.sys driver and Matrix Storage Manager console v7.8 for a couple years (CPU: Intel Pentium D 3GHz). The BSOD occurs about 4 secs into the display of the Windows XP logo Startup screen (which comes after the solid progress bar is completed).

Attempted steps at resolution so far include:

• Ran chkdsk /r from XP Recovery console, using F6 v5.7 ICH7R driver, reported drive sector repairs that were successfully fixed; none since then.
• Ran fixmbr and fixboot from Recovery Console
• Ctrl-I into the Intel RAID boot option ROM, which reports the normal array status with no problems
• Prepared a Kaspersky Recovery Disk (anti-malware) using BartPE & WinXP-SP3 and scanned the target machine, no problems reported
• Prepared Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD), which is based upon BartPE, using WinXP SP3 in order to boot up a "parallel" WinXP environment on the machine, from which I could do further troubleshooting; after that...
• Copying the ntoskrnl.exe from another XP-SP3 machine, from a WinXP-SP2 retail CD, or the KB979683 upgrade pack make no difference.
• replacing iastor.sys with both later and previous AHCI & 'RAID' versions 5.5, 7.8, 9.6 (note: only v5.7 works with XP Recovery Console on this machine)
• Restoring previous registry hives (System Volume Info\_restore{xxx}\RPxxxx from just prior to the start of the problem to as far back as a couple months.
• Ran Windows Repair from a WinXP (with slip-streamed SP3) DVD, which completed with no errors.

None of the above have solved my problem.

Based on my research re the boot sequence found on TechNet/MSDN and Stop error info coupled with timing of the error, I am currently under the imporession that there is a problem for ntoskrnl.exe loading the iastor driver & assoc Service.

Question 1: Has anyone else experienced a similar problem?

Question 2: What, if any, security related changes are made to the XP registry during the installation of the iastor.sys driver? Is it possible that changing the iastor driver withouth changing the security registry will prevent the replacement driver from operating properly? Is the iastor.cat file involved in that?

Question 3: If I convert my RAID10 volume (4 HDDs) drives to non-RAID in the boot option ROM, what happens to my data & applications (all in a single partition)? Is the result 4 HDDs with the stripped data reassembled into proper order?

Question 4: If I convert my RAD10 drives to non-RAID using the Matrix Storage Manager, what happens to my data & applications?

Question 5: I cannot find any directions on the Intel website or in the Intel Matrix Storage Manager v7 documentation I have about how to perform a RAID level migration from RAID10 to RAID5; how is this done?