New SATA drive causing problems.

System as follows

MSI K8N Neo 2 with AMD3200+ 1gb DDR under Windows X pro with SP2

160gb Maxtor 10 SATA, nothing else relevant.

I have just added another SATA (WD1200). System boots fine and runs OK for a couple of mins. As soon as the second drive is accessed, the whole system locks up. Drive is blank and unused. Changed SATA cable and also tried different channel, same effect every time.

My feeling is that the frive itself may be iffy unless I have missed something obvious. Can anybody help please before I launch the thing into space.

Thanks in advance.

 

Is the drive partitioned or formatted? If not, you should be getting some kind of error (though probably not a locked up system). If you go into the drive manager thing in Administrator Tools (I forget where exactly it is in XP) what does it show for the drive (or does showing the drive in the manager freeze the machine?).

 

Hi Gavster

the drive is formatted to NTFS and one large partition. Shows up in Disk Management as G: and all properties check out, i.e. working properly (dev manager). All appears OK until I try to read from the disk. I seem to be able to write to it OK but not read from it. Very odd.

Cheers

 

Download Western Digital's Data Lifeguard tools and test the drive. Just because it is new does not mean that it is not defective. Also, take note at exactally what you are doing when the freeze up occurs.
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