TimC,
Thankyou for your swift reply and help.
I have tried your suggestions, to no avail.
Not only was Virtual Clone Drive acting in a peculiar manner, but my physical optical drives were as well. They would lose their ability to read any type of disk, be it data, music, or video, but the device manager would report them working properly. The only thing that would make them work again was removing them, along with the ide channel, in device manager, rebooting, and letting windows reinstall them. This would work temporarily but the problems would resurface again in short order.(to the best I can pin it down, after a system reboot)
I reinstalled the O S tonight, in the standard fashion, without the F6 method, using standard windows drivers, rather than using Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers.
I have reinstalled Clone, Any, and Virtual, and everything appears to function normally.
In conclusion, it seems that I either had a corrupt Intel Raid driver, or possibly a problem caused by only having 1 hard drive installed, with the Intel Raid driver present. (I tried disabling RAID in the bios, which should have allowed normal function with 1 hd.)
Intel's website suggests intalling the O S, using the F6 method, with their scsi driver, for ease of setting up a Raid configuration, in the future, if you desire to.
In actuality, I probably won't be setting up a RAID, but will most likely just install a couple of more harddrives for storage and back up, so I will stick with what seems to be working. I do appreciate your input, and if you (or anyone else reading) have any insight as to what my problem with the Raid configuration may be, ( ) I welcome your help.
Thanks again,
sockeye