M2N-VM HDMI causes bad sectors on SATA HD on port1 yet again

[Quibus]

Hi All,

Sorry if this topic has already been discussed earlier, I must have overlooked it in my search then. But can anyone confirm if there's a structural problem with the ASUS M2N-VM HDMI mainboard or the nVidia 7050PV/630a chipset when using SATA harddrives?

One after the other I have had 2 brandnew drives connected to SATA1 starting to develop bad sectors each after just about 4 weeks of use. The only common denominator is the mainboard, so I really can't think of any other cause. First time I ran XP x64 on a Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb, which was replaced under warranty for a Seagate 7200.11 500 Gb. I then took a step back and installed XP 32-bit. In both cases SP1 & 2 were installed, together with the nForce drivers ASUS supplied on CD-Rom.

Installing these drivers was a major PITA, and I never got all components fully working (graphics, sound, an unknown device, etc.), no matter what I tried. I immediately got a bluescreen at the first reboot. I also noticed that after installing these drivers my drives started to make a horrible clonk at the end of every shutdown procedure. IIRC this was not the case beforehand. BTW: I don't use the RAID functionality at all.

The error that occurred with my drives was completely the same both times. The drives started to make progressively more clicking noises when in use, and tried to spin down/up. This even happened in an idle situation, when there was no diskactivity going on. After a few seconds the complete system just locked up, and would not boot up anymore. When locked up, even the screendistortion looked the same. Needless to day, the BIOS reported no SMART problem. The drives were both only 4-8 weeks old! AFAIK the drives on the other SATA ports are allright (well, up to now), and I have no indication they suffer from the same disease. However, I am prepared for the worst.

Both times I had partitioned in the drive in C: and D:, and the bad sectors only appeared to be present on the boot sectors of C:. XP complained about damaged sectors but could not repair them. When installed as a secundary drive I managed to copy all data from D: to the replacement bootdrive. I could format D: without a problem, but not C:. However, I could read the directory's on C:. But now the replacement drive is suffering from the same symptoms.

Did anyone else experience similar effects, and (more important) how can I prevent it from happening again? Could my mainboard be bad, or are the drivers to blame?

Kind regards,

Quibus