I'm in the process of rebuilding my machine after my virus attack.

Just a couple days before that, I'd gotten a new SATA dvd burner from newegg. I now have 2 SATA hds, this SATA dvd burner, and an IDE dvd burner. It was working perfectly before the virus issue.

Now, opening "my computer" takes 20 seconds for anytthing to appear. If I try to actually access that SATA burner, I get a BSOD. The other burner and HDs are fine. The error on the BSOD is different each time - NTFS.sys error, PFN List Corrupt, Page Fault in non paged area, etc. Usually there's cdrom or ata errors in the event logs as well.

I tried switching to a new sata cable and sata port on the mobo. Still the same.

I then disabled the drive in device manager. Now everything seems fine - My Comp opens instantly, no more bsod, etc.

Does this sound like a hardware issue (time to get a swap from newegg) or driver/software? I'd be surprised if it's drivers since the sata hds are ok (and the mobo has 4 identical sata ports, it's not one where there are some on one controller chip and some on another) Just surprising that teh drive would fail when I have a virus... seems too coincidental.

oh, and I ran scandisk on both hds and ran memtest86+ for a full cycle and got no errors either place.

have you tried the dvd drive on another machine? my guess is that the sata dvd driver might've been corrupted. usually a xp repair would fix it, since i don't really know you which files you should to replace.

Nope, haven't tried the drive elsewhere yet. I THINK my wife's computer has sata too, but I'll have to look.

It feels like a driver issue to me too.

Thanks for pushing me to recheck the software side - I uninstalled the nvidia nforce drivers and reinstalled. Seems to have fixed it!

One weird thing though - from nvidia, the latest nforce drivers for a 570 SLi Intel mobo are version 8.22, dated July 17 2006. ECS (mobo maker) has what they call a version 8.26, dated 1/30/2007. Can't find that anywhere direct from nvidia.