Serial ATA Nightmare!

[Da-Rock]

I installed a 120gb Western Digital Serial ATA drive and connected it internally to the 1st connector. After reading about using the Floppy disk to load Windows XP nothing much went wrong. I loaded WinXP and all of my Manufacturer drivers without issue. (The Serial ATA driver wasn't Windows certified)

After a week of flawless performance by my Serial ATA drive, it crashed! I turned it on one morning after a night without incident on the computer and it came up to the Safemode screen...(sort of that screen)

It said, "We're sorry, but windows did not close correctly blah, blah, blah...." It gave me the option to boot normally, safemode or from last known good boot etc.

After selecting any of the options it would goto the, "Windows Loading....." screen for a few seconds and then reboot with a flash! No matter what I did it would not load windows.

I gave in and put in my WinXP disk and started the reloading procedure. I tried both Repair and Full reinstall, but both would fail. Just as soon as it started to read the HDD it would freeze for a few seconds and then flash to the, "Windows had a problem that required it to be shutdown to prevent damage to your computer".

Basically it was dead in the water. I purchased an 80gb IDE HDD and loaded that. As soon as I loaded the Serial ATA drivers from the manufacturers disk, Windows crashed and would just reboot at the, "Windows Loading...." part. The only way to fix it was to disable the Serial ATA portion in the BIOS.

Gigabyte gave me new drivers with the same instructions, but all that did was frag my system and cause me to reload windows all over again!

Anyone have this issue or know what in the world I could do?

 

[Da-Rock]

Yeah, I downloaded those first before even going to Gigabyte. I can't figure out if its the drivers, the Serial ATA controller chip or Gigabyte's motherboard?

I love my motherboard and I am starting to hate Silicon Image..... At least Gigabyte decided to respond to their tech email.

 

[Da-Rock]

What's strange is that both Gigabyte's old and new drivers are not Windows Certified along with Silicon Image's drivers. All of them crash my Windows Professional XP.

The Serial ATA HDD seems to being acting dead too. I am lost on what is wrong.

 

[Da-Rock]

Bummer. The Gigabyte guy said I could return after his initial response didn't work. I really hate returning anything unless it's dead or I know for sure it's the item in question.

If I knew it was a bad board or chip then I would contact Gigabyte's RMA department.

I will search a little harder on the issue and then look into that. Thanks for the help.

 

[Da-Rock]

Update:

I got it running again after using Western Digital's diagnostic tools. Writing zeros to the drive allowed me to install WinXP again. This time I did NOT install the Serial ATA drivers. So far so good. We shall see in a week.

After thinking about it, this HDD was acting a lot like a HDD that had an OS on it from another Mobo. You know how they can be completely uncompatible with new mobos etc....This isn't the case here, but it sure acts like that......