I maked clean instalation on my 160GB Hitachi Sata2 disk. Only 1 disk and 1 partition, but after first restart setup in not continued. I try to install this WIn at my Friend and is working good. Then HDD must be OK.
Hitachi wrote - sata2 disk is suported automaticly at windowses.
After zillions of MS/Linux re-installs............
Burn a Linux distro, PCLinuxOS 2009 Gnome comes to mind. Pop in the disk, use GParted to delete your entire drive, format it to NTFS, resize it to say....138 gig left to right, label it MS7. Resize again 3 gig right of MS7, label it PageFile. Right of PageFile. Delete the remaining. Format to ext3. Resize to all but 1.5 gig., label it Linux. Right of Linux. Delete that 1.5. Format that to linux-swap, name it Swap. Pop in Win7 or whatever MS. Use the pagefile partition through computer management setup...! Reboot a couple times, just for kicks. Pop in that Linux animal. Dual boot and have fun. Oh, by the way. If at all possible, dunno..... how many/type of partitions can be set on one HDD, but it'd be nice to give MS maybe 20-30 gig only, all the rest NTFS for backup where you keep all your goodies. What I do is, 60 gig triple boot, 320 gig pagefile and NTFS backup. (I don't even know if four partitions are "allowed" on one hdd, as I always have had pagefile on 320 gig hdd.) Yea, 1)XP, 2)Linux or test Win7, 3)Linux, 4)linux-swap is four...... duh.....my bad......
The GParted can do all those operations at once..... but I find that for some reason...... a step to step like this works best to clear out that drive. Some how the 60 gig shows as 63.8...... but all at once...... 58.6...........
Asus, AMD, Cosair, Maxtor, Seagate, Nvidia, D-Link, MS, Logitech, HP all function just great...... with PCLinuxOS and XPpro........... itchy & scratchy w/Win7.