Hi,

A few days ago, while working with a graphical software, my PC crashed
(blue screen). That is a problem I had quite often after installing SP2
for windows XP. So I left the PC to reboot but then it took the PC 3
minutes to get to the login screen and when it finally got there,
getting to the desktop took another 3 minutes.

I found out that my second hardware (WESTERN DIGITAL sata 120 gigs) was
no longer accessible. At first, I thought that my hardware just died. I
disconnected the hardware and everything was fine, the system would
boot very fast. Although I didnt have any reason to believe that the
hardware was still good, I plugged in that drive to try and install
windows on it. I put the WINDOWS XP cd in, let the CD load the install
manager. When I got there, the two partitions I had on that hardware
were gone.. Everything look as if something just destroyed my
partitions except that one piece of information that was very odd.. It
said that the hardware was partitionned but I could not see them. I
destroyed what ever was there, created two new partitions, installed
windows on it, and I had no problems. Except that once during the
installation the system reported that it didnt find a file on the CD
and asked me to retry, I did and I had no problems after that.

I decided to use my other hardware again as the primary harddrive (on
channel 0) and I installed the newly formatted harddrive on channel 1
of my primary SATA. I reformatted the harddrive that was originally
"destroyed" and everything was fine, no bad sectors or anything.

Looked to me like I was back on track, that something caused my hard
drive on channel 1 during the crash to just lose its partition
information. Except that when I started to install my programs again, I
was getting almost consistent "MISSING FILE ON CDROM or DVD-ROM drives"
messages. Copying information from my DVD (backup data) back onto the
drive resulted in corrupting my files; any executable copied from my
CDROM or DVDROM drive to a hardware resulted in it being corrupted (CRC
errors, etc).

Here are the specs on my system :
Athlon 64 3000+
ASUS K8V Deluxe motherboard
DDR400 Corsair memory (dual) - 1 gig total
ATI 9800 pro video card
LG-4082 dvd burner
LG cd burner
2 Western digitals 120 gigs drive

My question is.. Has anyone ever had the same problem? If not, does
anyone have any clue as to what might be wrong with my system? I've
heard numerous problems about the K8V motherboards, apparently that
ASUS shipped a bad batch of them into the market (bad capacitors)..
Looks like I canot trust my SATA and EIDE controllers anymore...

Does anyone has a clue?

Thanks