I installed a single SATA 120gb Maxtor 8mb drive last week in my system, replacing the previous IDE drive I'd used for Windows and games. My system therefore consisted of what's in my sig, plus the SATA drive as the volume containing XP and my apps, with my second IDE drive used as a backup and storage drive. So far so good. It worked perfectly for the last week. However I started to develop problems over the last couple of days. - I got a succession of BSOD's relating to corrupt PFN upon Windows booting after the PC froze when I sent a message in Xfire. I could not even get into Windows to roll it back. I did a memory test from a boot disk, and it reported no errors. However after booting up after the mem test, everything seemed to return back to normal. - Last night however I got another succession of BSOD's, this time without specific error messages, and just the STOP numbers (too quick to write down). - I swapped back the old IDE drive (still had windows on it) and the computer booted properly, apps ran etc. I assumed therefore it was a problem with the SATA drive or maybe Windows. - I reconnected the SATA drive, and attempted to install Windows afresh. All was fine until the "39mins left" part of the installation, when it again BSOD'd. Bummer. Not as groovy as I hoped. - Reformatted the IDE drive, reinstalled Windows, and after multiple restarts the PC seems fine. No BSOD's. So first up, is this a fatal problem with the SATA or what? Anyone had a similar issue? Second, I now have the SATA drive hooked up aswell as the IDE primary drive. I can see it in XP etc, and was hoping that I could somehow test it for problems? Anyone know of some way to determine if there's a problem? I tried Chkdsk and it returned no errors. I've swapped the SATA lead for a new one (just in case) and I would like to somehow try and run it as a Windows volume in parallel with the IDE drive. Is this possible? Can I somehow transfer an image of the working drive across to the SATA via XP? Is it pointless using a SATA drive a games only drive with Windows as a boot volume? Any assistance would be massively appreciated.
