OK, I think I've figured out the source of my woes.

When my 2nd SATA drive is plugged in it causes the OS to lock up after a little bit. It's a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB.

I'm going to try a firmware update to see if that helps or not.

How do I tell if this is a duff drive or my PC just really hates having more than 1 SATA drive? It's chewed though SATA drives before.

The mobo. is an ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe, and I've got the primary HDD plugged into SATA 1 on the mobo, and the slave into SATA 2 (as recommended in the manual). With two optical drives plugged in to SATA 3 and 5 (I think).

Any ideas?

Just you talking about the sceond drive reminded me, years ago I had the same problem when I connected an IDE alongside my SATA drive. Never did find out what the problem was, even when I changed/removed the jumper bit on the IDE (just stuck the drive in a caddy)

The only thing I really remember from the whole experience was the suggestion on a forum that it was a possible BIOS conflict of some description

Well both drives are SATA. Apparently, I'm not the first person to encounter a problem with this drive when it's used as data storage instead of as an OS drive.

I'm currently investigating this:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardware/ ... -sata.html

If this works, it will be an inherent problem with Vista because Win 7 never gave me any of these problems.