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I put my computer together and loaded Windows XP Pro. I loaded the motherboard drivers (AGP driver, IDE Driver, onboard sound, onboard LAN and USB Drivers- there are no chipset drivers per se). I then loaded the video card drivers and everything went without a hitch. I then loaded all the service packs and then I loaded various applications and again everything was fine. My problem is that after about a week, whenever I shutdown my computer for the night and restarted it in the morning XP would always run chk dsk (yes I shutdown properly). After running chk dsk , XP would boot no problem until again I shutdown and restarted. If I left the computer on for a few hours I would get a yellow triangle in the taskbar telling me that system32\….. was corrupt and to run check disk. I would then reboot and XP would run Chk Dsk and once it rebooted again it would come up and be functional. Well it started getting progressively worse until I couldn’t be on for more than a few minutes before I got the yellow triangle in the taskbar. Eventually chk dsk couldn’t fix it and the computer kept rebooting itself before even loading xp. I used the western digital diagnostics tools to test the drive and it came back clean. I then started to hear clicking noises coming from my hard drive so I sent it back to WD and they sent me a new one. I installed the new drive, OS, Drivers, service packs and apps and everything was fine until I shut down . When I restarted the machine, I got chk dsk again. Once XP booted I could not get more that 2-3 minutes before I got the yellow triangle from hell or it would spontaneously reboot itself . I’ve swapped out the ram, video card, IDE Cables and power supply all to no avail. I also did a new reinstall without adding any drivers or software and I still get the corruption errors and then finally after this happens enough my computer still crashes and then when trying to boot crashes (just like if I pushed my reset button). The WD is quiet and also tests clean according to the data lifeguard tools. Does anybody know what could be causing this? Is the WD120JJ SE compatible with XP or is the 8mb cache causing problems. Like I said, I’ve tried swapping out ram, video and power supply with known good replacements and I still get the same result. Any help would be appreciated.

here’s my setup:


Soyo Dragon ultra 645DX chipset
300 watt Powerman Power supply
P4 2.5ghz Processor
1GB DDR Ram
ATI All in wonder Radeon 128MB 8500
Western Digital 120GB with 8MB Cache
Sony 16x DVD Rom
Sony 52 X CDRW

Could be a messed up motherboard with a bad primary IDE controller

I have two of those drives mirrored (for over a year) running fine on XP. Sumthin's up with your system.

Could be a messed up motherboard with a bad primary IDE controller

Im with that. Switch to your Secondary Controller and verify that your jumper setting is correct. I use Cable Select if its theonlyi drive onthe ribbon. If its sharing with another drive I put the boot drive on the first position set as.......**** I dont remmber. And im not at home to verify.

Id startby putting it onthe secondary controller on the ribbon by itself and set it to C.S. jumper setting. THen reinstall everything and see what happens.

That 300W psu is extremely low wattage for the computer you have it running in. If you leave it running for a while, the voltage drops too low and you hard drives crap out causing your problem. I would get a good 400 W Antec or Enermax psu to replace your current one.