I am not sure how it should be in your board, but I have an asus with a FastTrack controller and apart from an option in the booting section in Bios there is a switch in the board to disable it. In my case both things must be able or disable.

I hope it helps you.

Alright, well that does help a bit, I gotta disable FastTrack. Now I just got to figure out how, lol. I pretty sure there is no Bios option, looked all over. And nothing mentioned in the manual. Bah! I'm sure its just some dumb jumper setting or something. Anyone have this board and have some ideas?

LOAD THE NEWEST BIOS!

Im using the Award Bios, it is the latest according to the MSI website, still dont see any Raid or Fasttrack options :(

=/
is their a jumper to turn it off?

lol, thats what im wondering, hehe.

Pull out the soldering iron and remove the raid controller :D

I'm tempted, hehe. I know its gotta be some dumb jumper that im looking over or something. And the manual doesnt really give info in RAID which is stupid. Just tells you where the connectors are. As if the neon orange ports on the board werent obvious enough.

you can always end up buying another hd and using the raid 8)

it could be because of the typical boot from other device option, or any other option that makes reference to scsi boot. make sure you have them disable if you dont want to use them.
if not, my former advice was better XD

The FastTrack bios only loads when a RAID array is detected on the RAID controller at boot. To make it load you need at least 2 HDDs connected to the RAID controller.
On your board: "RAID function works w/ATA133+SATA H/D or 2 SATA H/D".

Your Windows XP BSOD problem shouldn't be caused by not loading the FastTrack bios and/or not having a RAID array.
It is probably related to the PSU or heat or RAM.
Check if your PSU (powersupply) is powerful enough for your system. I recommend a PSU of 300W minimum (depending on your peripheral devices).
Check if your CPU isn't too hot. All bioses implement a hardware monitor. It should be approximately 50 degrees Celsius (lower is better, much higher is a big problem). If your CPU is too hot, check if your HSF (heatsink+fan) is seated properly and that you have a good airflow through your case (Builders Guide for Desktop/Tower Systems). Also check if your (positive) voltages are within specs (they shouldn't be off more than a few 1/10 Volts, negative voltages are less important). They all should be within specs though (both CPU temp and voltages) else your system should have alerted you at POST.
If both PSU and heat are not the problem then it probably are your memorytimings. Most new systems require quality RAM (like Corsair or Kingston) to operate stabily. Even 'By SPD' can fail with low quality RAM. Does your system boot at lower memorySPEEDS (in Mhz)? If it does than set your bios back to 'default settings' (set your video adapter to 'AGP Card' if you have an AGP videocard ofcourse) and try lowering your memoryTIMINGS (in Ticks: T) and set ALL other memory related settings as less agressive as you can while maintaining 'normal' memorySPEED (the speed for which the memory was qualified). You can always try to raise these settings once you have a stable system. Typical symptoms of too agressive memoryusage are: being unable to boot into windows XP and if you manage to boot into Windows XP: datacorruption.
You may also want to test your memory for possible damage. Use an app like DocMemory (freeware). Do a burnin test. Typical symptoms of damaged RAM are not being able to boot into Windows XP or random resets/BSODs.
Optionally you can also try to boot as minimalistic as possible by disabling as much onboard devices as possible and leave out as much expansioncards and/or peripheral devices as possible.

If you still can't boot into Windows XP. Try to boot into Safe Mode (press F8 after POST before Windows load screen/at boot options). If you can't boot into Safe Mode at full CPU and memoryspeed try booting into Safe Mode at lower CPU and memoryspeed. If you get into Safe Mode RMB click 'My Computer' and select 'Properties'. Go to the 'Advanced' Tab and click the 'Settings' button in the 'Startup and Recovery' section. Disable 'Automatically Restart'. Reboot into Windows XP 'normal'. Now your system won't reboot when a BSOD occurs but displays the BSOD. Write down the COMPLETE errorcode. Now try to find help/info with this errorcode.

Hmmm, well its a head ache of a problem, thats for sure, hehe. I disabled all the on board crap, knocked the processor fsb back to 100mhz. Temp. shouldnt be the problem, its staying around 50 degress celcious. I took one of my old hard drives and installing XP on it, we'll see if a fresh install of XP fixes it. Lets hope so

And just so I understand where your coming from. The FastTrack error is more or less just an fyi message. It shouldnt actually stop booting to windows?

If your not using the MSI driver this could be the problem, The newest RAID driver for the promise do not work, They give me bluscreen errors all the time. And you cant disable the RAID onboard yet it will prolly be in a BIOS update.

Well i put the new hard drive in there. fdisk, format, installed XP in Dos, rebooted, still has the FastTrack message, then after Post it says Error Loading OS. Sheesh, what the heck.

If yer not using RAID or just 1-SATA drive u need a diffrent driver u do know this right ?

Its working!

Well like you said, the FastTrack message really wasnt the cause. It was more or less just an fyi message, just letting me know RAID isnt enabled. Turns out the PC was just throwing a fit trying to load XP on my old hard drive. I needed to format and reinstall XP, worked like a charm. Thanks a ton for your help guys, really appreciate it.

Indeed, the FastTrack message is just a FYI message. The Promise chip doesn't detect any devices (RAID-array) on its controllers at POST so it does not load the FastTrack bios and informs you it didn't load it. Nothing more. This might result in Windows not recognizing the controller though, but that shouldn't be a problem since it needs no drivers for it since the RAID controller is not used. It should NOT cause ANY problems for normal Windows operation. Windows will recognize the controller once the FastTrack bios loads (when you use the RAID controller with a RAID-array) and will install/load the drivers at that time.

Great to hear you solved your problem!

I still don't fully understand what caused the initial problem. Was it a bad install?

If yer not using RAID or just 1-SATA drive u need a diffrent driver u do know this right ?

You can't just use a RAID controller as a 'normal' ATA controller. The controller needs an ATA-BIOS to do that instead of a FastTrack RAID-BIOS. Some boards come with a jumper to switch between the RAID-BIOS or the ATA-BIOS but if I'm right your board does not have such a jumper. Maybe you have a BIOS settings to switch between the 2 controllerbioses but I don't think you have.

If you can't switch the controller BIOS then it's not possible to use the RAID controller as a 'normal' ATA controller as far as I know...

I might have been wrong! It seems you can setup single disk RAID 0 arrays!

According to this (older) MSI article (How to : use your RAID IDE3/IDE4 as normal IDE for hdd) it should be possible to use your RAID controller as a 'normal' ATA controller.

I don't know if it works but you can try:

First you'll have to install the RAID driver for your board (Promise Serial-ATA RAID Driver version: 1.0.0.19)

Then you have to connect your HDD to one of the RAID controllers and boot.

After the BIOS quickstart, you'll see the RAID BIOS initialization. You should see "No Array is defined", wait for a while, the BIOS will auto-detect your harddisk and auto-setup a 1+0 single strip single disc RAID-0 for you. When it's done, you will see a WARNING message telling you an array was created. If this autosetup is not successful, you may go into the RAID configuration by CTRL-F and select Auto-Setup. You can choose whether Desktop/Server/AV Editing for typical application to use.

The system will auto-reboot.

After reboot, go to system BIOS again!

Goto Advanced BIOS Features -> Boot Sequency, change the boot device to the RAID drive "BBS-0(RAID):FT Ary 1" for example

Save and exit setup.

You should have no problem in running your harddisk and booting to Windows.

To add more hard drives, you may repeat the steps ONE DRIVE AT A TIME, it's crucial to make sure the RAID BIOS detects each drive, set each drive as single disc array and NOT to mix with other existing arrays.

Hope this helps!

Yeah, the problem seemed to be, I had XP Pro on my old PC, with lots of stuff installed that i didnt want to have to reinstall. So I just swaped the drive over to the new PC and figured it would work, as we all know, it didnt Not sure if it was because it was swapped over from a Pentium 3 PC to an AMD XP PC or what. But in the end, a fresh XP install did the trick. I now have another question about video cards with this mobo, but I'll move that to a new post Thanks again guys, you all rock