Issue with SATA Drive on an IDE Motherboard

col_mustard

Honorable
Dec 27, 2012
3
0
10,510
I wanted a single, large drive on my PC and purchased a 1TB SATA drive to replace my existing 2 160GB IDE drives. I have four SATA connections on the motherboard and plugged the SATA drive into one of them (jumpered to 1.5 Gb/s) while leaving my master IDE drive still connected. The bios recognized the drive and, after I initialized the drive, I was able to see it in Windows. I unplugged both IDE drives and rebooted, installing Windows 8 on the SATA drive in the process. Everything worked fine through this point.

That said, I have since discovered that when I perform certain activities, such as when I attempt to view my network connections or try to access an external USB hard drive, the system crashes (white screen or white screen with pinstripes). I'm not sure if this is indicative of a conflict of some sort or a bios issue. I've dabbled in the bios and device manager but nothing leaps out at me as obvious.
 

PassMark

Distinguished
It would be surprising if adding a new SATA drive would provoke a crash while accessing the network or USB.

I assume you weren't running Win8 in the past?
I think it is much more likely that the problems are due to the upgrade to Win8 and not the upgrade of the hard drive.

As you already hinted at, first step should be to update BIOS and all device drivers. Also check the Windows event log to see if there are any messages just before the crash occurs. Is the video card in the machine compatible with Win8?
 

col_mustard

Honorable
Dec 27, 2012
3
0
10,510
You are correct in suggesting that I upgraded to Win8 at the same time as adding the hard drive. I'll review the device drivers a little more carefully. I at first thought I had a video issue and checked the device drivers there. They were all up-to-date. I've pretty much ruled out the video as an issue as I can work on the computer for a couple of hours with no issue but when I go to Explorer and click on Network, I'm guaranteed an immediate crash.

I'll also look at the event log for any clues there.
 

col_mustard

Honorable
Dec 27, 2012
3
0
10,510
I did run a compatibility check before installing Windows 8 and everything passed. I've not added any apps except Chrome since I installed Win8 (and I did a clean install rather than upgrade).

I see several errors in the event log about restarting without proper shutdown. There is also a consistent warning on startup about failing to load the driver WudfRd which appears to be needed for the USB storage devices for the SD/CF card readers. That sounds possibly related though device manager says they are running properly and that the driver is current.