Blue Screen after HDD installation

[VWIMaster]

Hi,

You may remember me from some time ago when I was having blue screens on my old HP Pavilion computer. Well now I have a similar problem but with my father's home-built computer and I need some help in solving some BSODs related to hardware installation.

The specification of the home built computer which is nicknamed "Shaz" has a GA-7VAXP Ultra motherboard, Socket A with Athlon XP processor 2.1GHz (not sure of the exact model). It has 1GB of Kingston ValueRAM and is running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 that I installed just over 18 months ago. Up until yesterday I have had no real problems with the computer except lack of storage space.

It currently has a SATA-150 Seagate hard drive (250GB) which is set up as the boot partition, and a standard ribbon cable ATA Seagate 80GB drive with no boot partition present. I have just purchased a new SATA hard drive (Seagate 250GB, very similar to existing drive) and wish to replace the 80GB with the new drive so I can move the 80GB to the aforementioned HP computer. The 250GB has six partitions and the 80GB has two. This was to match the configuration of an old computer because my father found it easier - there were eight partitions on the old one due to a BIOS limitation.

Just need to mention before continuing that the motherboard doesn't support SATA-300. I have a jumper set on the new hard disk that limits the speed to SATA-150 so that the disk will supposedly work.

Anyway, I connected the new SATA hard drive, leaving the existing drives connected, and rebooted. The motherboard picked up the new drive correctly. Sadly, a BSOD appeared just after the Windows XP logo.

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Stop C000021a Unknown Hard Error

Unknown Hard Error

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I thought this may be due to the fact there were no partitions present so I booted into Seagate DiscWizard and partitioned the new hard disk with three partitions in the format 20GB/80GB/150GB. On reboot I recieved BSOD yet again, but this time a different error appeared.

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A problem has occured and Windows has been shut down...... (etc)

SESSION3_INITIALISATION_FAILED

**** STOP: 0x0000006F (0xC0000130, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

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I disconnected the new drive.

Windows booted fine (but did one of those consistency disk checks first on Drive C, which found no errors).

Confused, I reconnected the new drive and booted into a BartPE CD that I had got handy. Funnily enough all hard disks including the new one were perfectly accessible (besides being in the incorrect letter order). I even wrote a few files onto each partition and then tested they had saved properly (they opened so I assumed the hard drive is working).

Believing it may be the letters being out of order, I removed the 80GB disk and mysteriously recieved a BSOD on reboot into Windows XP.

--

Stop C000021a Unknown Hard Error

Unknown Hard Error

--

Same error. Confusing....

So I put the computer back to it's original configuration. Removed the new hard drive. Windows yet again did a consistency check on Drive C but this time it froze on section 2 at 37%. No disk activity. I reset the computer and rebooted to get a BSOD.

--

A problem has occured and Windows has been shut down...... (etc)

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

**** STOP: 0x000000ED (0x8671C900, 0xC000009D, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

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I immediately panicked. I shut the computer down, disconnected and reconnected the old SATA drive and rebooted. Windows started normally. No problems. I shut down and rebooted without problems.

This morning Windows still booted fine without problems...

I've dealt with hard drive changes before but this is the first SATA drive I have added as additional storage. (The first one is connected OK so why not the second?) I am now totally confused and would like someone to help me shed some light onto the matter.

Thank you in advance

VWIMaster