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My Motherboard, an Asus A8V Deluxe uses the Promise Fastrak 378 onboard RAID controller and I discovered that there does not appear to be a Vista driver for this. However I decided to try using the Windows 2003 Server drivers which come on the ASUS CD and loaded them during Vista Set up and hey presto it all worked fine. I don’t seem to have any obvious issues and Vista isn’t whinging so it looks OK as a work round.

Hopefully this helps someone else in a similar situation.

Had a bad day with my main development machine yesterday. For some obscure reason during a fairly routine download it slowed right down then suffered a total lockup. I left it a good 10 minutes to see if it was going to bounce back to life as it still seemed to be responding albeit very very slowly, but I eventually gave up the ghost and decided a hard reset was the only way out. I don’t like doing this and have only done it a handful of times on this pc which has been very stable since I built it a couple of years back.

Anyway the deed was done and I waited it rebooting but it never. I simply kept going so far through the reboot and then restarting again. I tried evrything I know including adding a spare hard drive tot he system, loading an OS onto it and simply treating my main partition as a spare drive so I coul dget data off. But the main partition (SATA RAID based) kept showing an IO error and any attmpts to examine it from Windows Set up resulted in a BSOD saying error in ntfs.sys.

I tried a CHKDSK from Windows boot up from the spare disk, and this basically found my main RAID partition destroyed.

Fortunately I have a external Hard drive I use to run backups on and this has about 98% or my work on, up to about a week back.

So I decided to do a format and clean install. The Disk array came up fine though all my data is gone. I have also tried a clean boot of Vista on it and this went well- see other post as there is a way round the RAID driver issues.

So I have decided to do a full clean install onto Vista thus getting me back working with a swanky new interface. I have been using Vista quite a bit on my laptop but really want to get using it now so having a disaster like this is as good a time as any.

I am currently restoring data and programs, so if you are waiting on work from me , be aware I might be a bit delayed. My biggest problem is probably that I have lost all my email data., hopefully I should be back fully operational by the end of the weekend, hopefully with a slightly quicker PC seeing its now freshly rebuilt.

I also took the opportunity to install a spare 500Gig SATA disk as a system backup volume so I can use this to replicate my data to on a scheduled basis.

An advisory notice has been issued by Anti Viru specialists, Symantec over a mass outbreak of the Peacomm Trojan. Be aware whe receiveing mails with the following subject lines, not to open the mail or the attachment therein.

 Worm Detected!
[UNABLE TO SCAN] Worm Detected!
[WARNING - ENCRYPTED ATTACHMENT NOT VIRUS SCANNED] Virus Alert!
[WARNING - ENCRYPTED ATTACHMENT NOT VIRUS SCANNED] Worm Detected!
Worm Detected!
Undeliverable: Virus Det
[ATTENTION - NON TRAIT? PAR ANTIVIRUS -- WARNING - NOT VIRUS SCANNED]%s
Virus Detected!ected!
Virus Activity Detected!
Halleynet Web Media recommend you never access the internet without anti virus protection and not to use Auto Preview in Email clients. Read more on Symantecs website.

A colleague found this on his laptop the other day and was obviously having an issue with it- think it was reporting in Task manager that it had several tens of million’s of Page faults. You may need to expand your columns view in Task manager to see this.

I was asked first do I know any websites that list running processes on your PC, and second- any idea what xcmon32 is?

Well the first question is an easy one, the best site I have found in processlibrary.com, it lists all the most well known processes on a pc and tells you whether you can stop them, remove them whatever. Very useful for gamers as you want to get rid of any unrequired apps before playing online.

They have a rather useful extension to the Task Manager too, that allows you to directly link from Task manager to their website for any gven process and see what it does.

However unusually it did not list xcmon32.

A quick search on Google only found a couple of hits and those led to threads on some techy Bulletin Boards which discussed the xcmon32 process as a virus or possible spyware/trojan. I have to say I thought this unlikely so did a bit more digging on a similar PC to my colleague. The answer was pretty well ther ein an ini file on the system- xcmon32.ini. It showed a network path that was being used to collect logs- by the look’s of things, audit logs. And indeed this is what it is, a system audit tool deployed by an admin in the network, to monitor the executables running on your PC and report back- so Big Brother is watching.

The executable reports the following: activeITassets activeSAM Agent . Its made by someone called Monactive Software who now seem to  belong to this website: Centenial Software.