Another update:
Installed Windows XP to the other drive, and kept the original one unplugged (bare in mind they are identical drives). Windows install went smoothly, and noticed no problems at all so thought they original HDD might be on it's way out. So I burned a copy of the PowerMax 4.23 HDD utility boot iso you can get from their website and ran it on the original HDD, took about 2 hours for a full scan but it came back as working perfectly, so that was very confusing.
Rebooted back into Windows XP on the other drive, and tried to open Internet Explorer 7 only to be presented with an error from the system tray:
So I then used the Windows XP CD to open the Recovery Console and chkdsk /r from there, which I did and it got most of the way. Hit 99%, then went back to 50% and didn't move, left it like that for 10 minutes, so I rebooted and went back into Windows. Upon getting back into Windows XP, I tried IE7 again and it worked fine. Scheduled another disk check and rebooted, this time chkdsk loaded but said it couldn't open the drive for exclusive access or something, and just booted into Windows XP. Right now running a error-checking through Windows XP on the drive, on "Phase 4" and going very slow.
But really I think this error checking is a dead end, don't think the drives are faulty since the other one passed a rigourous official Maxtor disk checker. Right now I'm thinking mobo, and in particular the sata chip on the board might be duff.
Anyone got any ideas? and apologies for the walls of text
Installed Windows XP to the other drive, and kept the original one unplugged (bare in mind they are identical drives). Windows install went smoothly, and noticed no problems at all so thought they original HDD might be on it's way out. So I burned a copy of the PowerMax 4.23 HDD utility boot iso you can get from their website and ran it on the original HDD, took about 2 hours for a full scan but it came back as working perfectly, so that was very confusing.
Rebooted back into Windows XP on the other drive, and tried to open Internet Explorer 7 only to be presented with an error from the system tray:
After attempt to re-open it, Internet Explorer 7 tried to download a file "ms.htm" which is the main page for the msn website. And also got a system tray error saying:
Tried running the error checking tool (right click on drive -> properties -> tools -> error-checking) and it said it couldn't be ran saying "Windows was unable to complete the disk check". So I tried defrag utility and it says that chkdsk is scheduled to run on next boot up (probably explained why the error-checking tool wouldn't run). So I rebooted, and expected chkdsk to run on start-up but it didn't, just booted into Windows. Tried IE7 again and didn't get any corruption messages but it just tried to download "ms.htm" from the msn homepage. Tried to run chkdsk /f from a cmd prompt to schedule a chkdsk on boot up this time and it scheduled, so I restarted and yet again it didn't run on boot-up.
So I then used the Windows XP CD to open the Recovery Console and chkdsk /r from there, which I did and it got most of the way. Hit 99%, then went back to 50% and didn't move, left it like that for 10 minutes, so I rebooted and went back into Windows. Upon getting back into Windows XP, I tried IE7 again and it worked fine. Scheduled another disk check and rebooted, this time chkdsk loaded but said it couldn't open the drive for exclusive access or something, and just booted into Windows XP. Right now running a error-checking through Windows XP on the drive, on "Phase 4" and going very slow.
But really I think this error checking is a dead end, don't think the drives are faulty since the other one passed a rigourous official Maxtor disk checker. Right now I'm thinking mobo, and in particular the sata chip on the board might be duff.
Anyone got any ideas? and apologies for the walls of text
So I guess either the sata cable was dodgy (although I used 2 different ones that I had here already and no joy) or the Intel controlled sata channels on this board have gone end up.
