I recently purchased a new PC with the following components:
CPU Intel Core-Duo E6600 2.40 GHz 1066FSB 4MB Cache LGA775
MEM OCZ Vista Upgrade PC2-6400 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 CL5-5-5-15 240PIN DIMM
ASUS P5N-E SLI NF650I SLI
nGear Flash Card Reader 3.5IN Internal USB Black CF/SM/SD/MMC/MS/XD
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 HD 3GB/S 7200RPM 16MB Cache NCQ
LG GSA-H50N DVD+RW 18X8X16 DVD-RW 18X6X16 DL 10X/4X DVD Writer IDE 2MB Black OEM W/ SW
eVGA GeForce 7900GS KO N624
Antec Sonata II Black ATX 16IN Mid Tower Quiet Case 3X5.25 2X3.5 4X3.5IN 450W
Once I got it home I installed Vista Ultimate (32-bit version) on the PC's existing Seagate 320GB SATA drive and configured it to my liking. The new OS ran problem-free for a couple of days so I added a second Maxtor 250GB IDE hard drive from my old PC (as a secondary master) in order to hold the XP Professional operating system (for dual-boot) when I got around to installing it (this older IDE drive was correctly formatted with Maxtor's MaxBlast software to its correct 239GB size before I pulled it from the old PC).
I ran with just the blank drive (Vista recognized it as drive E:) for a day or two and everything was humming along fine until I went to play a game in the DVD-drive. The PC immediately went into a blue screen of death and displayed a BSOD Stop error 0x0000008e. I rebooted the PC and, after Vista loaded, tried to run the game from the optical drive again. Same BSOD error. Thinking it might be the DVD drive at fault, I threw the DVD-burner from my old PC into the case (as an IDE primary slave to the original DVD-drive's IDE primary master). The computer's BIOS and Windows Vista both recognized the new drive but, when I went to play the game from it I got the same BSOD crash. That ruled out the original DVD drive as the culprit.
I decided to run System Restore at this point. There were about 15 or 20 restore points to choose from so I picked one from the previous afternoon. When System Restore was done and tried to reboot the system I got another BSOD. After restarting the PC I appeared to be where I wanted to be on the System Restore timeline but all of the old restore points were now gone (all that was left was the point I was currently at and there was no option to undo my previous Restore).
The PC ran fine after that (no more BSODs from the optical drive or from any games) so I decided to attempt the WinXP installation on to my second physical drive the next morning. I booted from the WinXP CD and told it to set-up Windows in the 250MB IDE drive (the WinXP install routine recognized the older IDE drive as 239MB drive C: while the 320GB SATA drive was listed as as an "unknown" 137GB drive D:). Setup did its thing but, after it rebooted the first time it ran the "loading WinXP" screen for about a minute before displaying another BSOD (this time it was BSOD Stop error 0x0000007b). After I rebooted from this, neither the system BIOS nor Vista recognized the IDE drive anymore. I turned the PC off, disconnected and reconnected the drive, and rebooted. The drive was back again (recognized by both the system BIOS and Vista). I tried the WinXP installation a second time but wound up with the same result... a BSOD after the first reboot and an unrecognized drive.
I've since permanently disconnected the IDE drive and everything now seems to running fine. I can't explain why but it seems that my new PC doesn't like the old Maxtor drive at all and will probably continue to produce blue screen errors as long as it's plugged in (whether as a system boot drive or as a blank storage drive). I've come to terms with that (a family member will probably get my old PC anyway so, what the hell) but that raises some new questions:
1. Can anyone offer any theories as to why the old Maxtor IDE drive would cause these sort of problems? It was only about a year old and it ran without any issues in my old PC. Am I right in assuming that it's the main culprit for all of those BSOD stop errors or might there have been something else?
2. It seems that most people who set up a dual-boot Vista/XP system start with XP first and then add Vista. There's too much stuff for me to undo now that Vista is loaded so can I still do it the other way around and still get a problem-free result? Are there any issues I should know about when doing it this way?
3. I want to set up my dual-boot Vista/XP system on two separate physical drives so I'll probably buy a new 320GB SATA drive. How can I get WinXP to recognize the drive as larger than 137GB?
Any and all input is appreciated.
