Vista 64-Bit + WD + Nvidia =/ Compatable?

Ok, from day one using vista I had issues with doing anything hard drive related, after installing nvidia's drivers, things got alot better, then when vista did a driver update, everything became perfect. Until one day I tried to install a game on my secondary disk. See I use my raptor for os and intensive games, then my wd320gb disk for other installations and as a temporary download location, then have my other 500's and 750 for pure data storage.

Well, I went to install this game only to see the installer sit there for a few minutes then hit me with a error saying it couldn't create folders, so I go to the disk, try to create a folder there, only to have explorer.exe lockup on me as soon as I right clicked. After a few minutes it works again and lets me create the folder. I then go and try the installer again, but it gives me the same error. I then try to copy a rather large file from the hd to my raptor, it starts the transfer then just quietly closes with out giving me a error or anything noting that it failed.

I then tried to open a winrar archive I had on the disk, it sits for a few minutes then says there was a I/O Device error. Well, I think maybe the drive is dying... so I try to run chkdsk on it only to have it start and close just like the file transfer. I boot up hirens' and run the WD diag utility, it does it's scan, says the drive is fine, I boot back up into windows and try chkdsk and actually complete a while scan with the /f toggle, it comes up fine, no errors, so wtf is my problem? This ONLY happens on this ONE drive, and as far as I can tell, it's not a bad drive, so it must be vista, but if it's vista, why don't my other drives have issues... Oh by the way, when I first had issues with this it was before the install, it was during a defrag with diskeeper, which I have since uninstalled...

I'm terribly sorry for this extremely long post, but figured I should include all the details possible... please help me with out this problem of mine..

was it defraging while you were trying to install a game on it?

Hah, this may sound stupid, but I can't really recall, I tend to have terrible memory, but meh, I don't think so... oh, but what did happen was I changed my flashget download folder from my raptor to my slave and it started to move the files from one place to the other... then things got bad, but I figured at the most, it'd just slow down and the continue as normal once finished. Am I wrong about this? Tks for response!

It could also be the IDE controller. Take a look in the event log and see if there's any warnings about it.

All drives are sata... the most I get in event viewer is "The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur." - Source: Volmgr

Soo, idk, I'm going to try taking the drive out and put a older 250gb ide drive in it's place... might try a format first though.

SATA actually is IDE, as is PATA...

Since your event log does not indicate a hardware issue, you may want to simply do a system restore to the day before you installed the game, since that's when the trouble started. This, at least would rule out driver/registry issues.

Well, I just got a bsod last night... I was trying to copy a rainbow table off of the drive to one of my externals and got hit with the "irq not less and or equal" grrr would a bad drive really be able to cause a serious crash? Where's the error handling? Meh, gotta be vista, lemme look around and try some other drivers. I'll try out system restore after that... I just ordered 4gb of ballistix ram for vista, so now I really don't want to back down. Thanks!

A bad drive, like any other failing piece of critical hardware can bring any system to its knees at any given time.

Vista is actually very stable, but can still be compromised by driver conflicts. I'd say try system restore first, as this issue did not arise until immediately after a software installation. Remember, system restore is quick, easy, free and reversible.

Yup yup, I'll try it in a bit, heading out to beaumont texas for the week end in a few hours so won't get much of a chance to test it. I'm thinking crashes would only really happen if the main boot disk was failing but not a slave, so it's either drivers or maybe partition issues maybe some misconfiguration... I just want to get my rainbow tables off of it and then format the beast. Gonna try a roll back first though. Thanks!