blinking 1394 light on 002r

[Punch Drunk]

i have dual boot system, i do not use the xp side for anything but pro tools, simply because i cannot for the life of me get it to run on vista. i dont want help with that, ive given up. in any event, on saturday, i recorded a few songs, everything was fine, i restarted into vista, went about my business. today i booted back into xp to record something, the entire computer is laggy. pro tools buffer errors, cant bounce tracks without errors, etc. i deleted preferences and tried that, now im able to record for about a minute..but still cant bounce songs. all while this is going on, the 1394 light blinks now and then. sometimes itll be solid for the session then flicker a lil bit, then when i exit pt it blinks non stop.

i honestly just dont understand what could happen in a few days, when i did nothing to any of the software on the xp drive. its on a completely separate drive, and it wasnt booted into since saturday. the vista drive doesnt have viruses, i dont install anything into the xp drive from there, nothing.

anyone have any ideas?

also, what is the fastest affordable ($200-300) processor out right now? i may just buy a new mobo, cpu, and ram, and jump to windows 7 now that pro tools finally decided to support operating systems during its active lifespan.

[cwsand]

Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious, but have you rebooted, tried reinstalling the Digi drivers and/or Pro Tools, try a system restore or restoring XP from a backup image? It's impossible to know what's changed to cause PT not to run properly without a bit of troubleshooting. Could even be that some hardware has failed. As far as affordable processors - check out the I7 sticky, you won't be disappointed!

[Punch Drunk]

shortly after this post when i booted back into xp i had a chck disc run pop up and apparently invalid security id's for about 80,000 files needed to be replaced with the default keys. i used the manufacturers tools to check the drives and it says they are fine, and all of my data is backed up, im just going to try to install it on vista again, and if all else fails, just reinstall xp. im just worried if ill have to redo the boot options since it's dual boot.

thank you for the suggestions though, i figured it might be the i7, how is pro tools functioning on windows 7 so far?

[Punch Drunk]

after many times trying to reinstall windows, even though many checks said it was fine, i've concluded the hard disc died. luckily, my machine has 4, one of which is a back up everything, so i moved some stuff around and put xp on one of the other drives. everythings fine now.

still looking to upgrade to windows 7/i7 tho, and the 1394 light is also still blinking even tho pro tools works fine,