NF7-S faulty SATA controller or hard drive?

Hi,

I've just built an XP Pro/SP1 system using an NF7-S v2.0 mobo, XP2100+
Tbred B, 2 x 256Mb TwinMOS 3200 and a Maxtor 6Y160M0 SATA hard drive. All
ran well for three days, then a problem occurred. When trying to
decompress a Winrar file the operation failed and produced two 0 byte
read-only subdirectories in the destination folder; the same operation
completed successfully when I tried again with a different destination
folder.

The two unwanted subdirectories could not be deleted so I rebooted to an
administrator account in safe mode, forced a change of ownership on them
and deleted them. When I rebooted the computer it failed trying to load
the file system. There was a BSOD for a split second then a spontaneous
reboot. I tried the following:


Cleared the CMOS, loaded failsafe defaults and rebooted.

Re-flashed the BIOS (18).

Connected the SATA cable to the secondary port.

Booted the XP Pro CD to attempt a repair.....BSOD related to ntfs.sys

As above, but to re-install XP, same result.

It now seems as though whenever an attempt is made to access the SATA
drive it causes a BSOD.

I disconnected the SATA cable from the drive and installed a Promise IDE
RAID card with a pair of IBM drives which ran my system previously. XP
booted normally but failed to do so when I reconnected the SATA cable.
Even when not the boot drive, access to the SATA drive causes a BSOD.

The final test was to boot from the RAID card and connect the SATA cable
when XP had finished loading. There was an immediate BSOD. There have been
numerous reports of data corruption with single or RAID SATA drives on
earlier NF7-S boards. I bought the v2.0 thinking that the later hardware
and BIOS updates had cured the problem.

Does it sound as though I have a faulty SI controller or SATA hard drive?
I don't have another SATA drive to try and my only 'spare' IDE drives are
now running the system again.


Regards,
Tom