Windows Vista forum: Services Lost After Crash - Vista

Dear Forum,

This is a very strange one. On 5/5, my Vista Ultimate 32-Bit desktop suffered a catastrophic failure. After several attempts to determine root cause - booting respectively from Vista, XP Pro SP3, Win7 Home Premium, and many other boot disks failed, except WipeDrive 6 (WD6) - failed. After booting from WD6, I ran verification on "C" drive, and it failed all tests. I can't claim complete surprise, since that drive always exhibited strange behavior like periods of high pitch buzzing. Fortunately, I cloned the drive when XP was the active system. I swapped failed drive with the clone, and the system rebooted to XP. After 1.5 days, all software is up to date.

However, there are 3 outstanding problems - MB is ABIT IP35 Pro:

1. The Creative SB Live! Sound card no longer works.
2. There also is no audio from the 7.1 Chan. HD from MB.
3. A PCI based card with 5 USB ports doesn't work.

Both #1 & #2 worked fine under Vista. Item #3 is new with WinXP Pro.

While I still plan to upgrade to Win7, I prefer to stick with XP for at least another month or until the system stabilizes. Any advice on cause of issues above will be welcome. Thanks for your support.