BSODed... flaky SATA controller?

[sawyen]

Just got a new maxtor drive, hooked it up to my wife's MSI neo2 Platinum.. 1/2 way into installing Office XP.. BSODed...

At first I thought was the memory, as Neo2 has been known to be really picky on memory. The MSI been given my old 2 sticks of Corsair TwinX C2PT... and so I dropped the timings to SPD.. BSOD again... dropped it to 2T... got Office XP to install, but when i was installing FEAR.. BSOD again..

I thought was just a flaky new 1.B BIOS, then I flashed to an old 1.9 BIOS (floppy style). Still getting BSOD everytime when I get 1/2 way thru installation. I get BSOD in all sorts of other stuff, like searching for media files using WMP9. Reaches about 74% and *SNAP*.. BSODed again when I opened some media files.

Then I thought of reinstalling the Nforce3 driver.. Going into the Nvidia Ethernet driver part.. BSOD AGAIN!! So i disabled the MAC controller in BIOS.. reinstalled agian.. seemed to work.. Re-enabled MAC and all was working well when iti BSODed at the very last few files when I'm installing FEAR.

So I pulled out the memory, chucked in my Microns again as they were working fine before. STILL GETTING BSOD. Chucked in my old Kingston PC2700 and.. To not much astonishment, it BSODed again. Then I unplugged ALL SATA drives, leaving a 160GB IDE system drive. And everything WORKED!!!

Eveything became flawless.. No BSOD no crashes.. So I thought it was the drive.. I chucked it into my Nforce4 3800X2.. IT WAS WORKING FINE!! Chkdsk it and no errors no nothing. Tach worked fine, dropped a 60GB batch file in and out of that drive and all was fine.

So help me out guys, my wife's rig can live on a single IDE as she has her work on it as well. Her simulations also works better on separate drives.

[sawyen]

There HAS to be someone who had this problem with Neo2 Plat before yes?

[herulach]

Have you run the maxtor diagnostic tools to see if theres anything wrong with the drive?

[sawyen]

Gee.. U brot up a good point, Havent used Maxtor's local tool.. But have used window chkdsk.. no problems...

Will burn an ISO and try it out tonight.

[herulach]

They often pick out problems with the firmware etc, rather than the actual disk area, which is all chkdsk does.

[sawyen]

well, I've read the FAQ for PowerMax diagnostics.. Apparently they dont work with Nforce3 and 4 RAID chip controlled SATA. Bummer.. Any other tricks guys?

[Paul Adams]

Windows XP?
SP2?
AV installed?

So your system disk is IDE and you have a SATA disk you want to use for installing apps & data?
(I have an HP Pavilion which used to behave strangely when I booted off IDE and also had a SATA disk installed, since then it's given me cause to avoid systems using PATA and SATA hard disks at the same time.)

SATA/RAID driver up to date?

Have you tried checking the properties of any disk controllers/channels in Device Manager - I'm thinking something like disabling caching/queueing.

What is the bugcheck code, and is any driver referenced? (if it restarts before you can read it, it should be visible in the System event log through Event Viewer)

[sawyen]

I havent been able to install XP on SATA for some reason, the XP just wont recognise my drives as valid storage devices. And yes.. In case anyone ask, I did press F6 and installed the Nvidia RAID and Storage driver. This only happens to me with the MSI Neo2 Plat.. My old AV8 VIA RAID works fine.

[arthurleung]

Shoot and email to Maxtor and ask them for a new firmware for your HDD. The old firmware have poor compatibility with many RAID controllers and also NF3/NF4.