Crashing

Hi, I am a relative idiot when it comes to computer stuff. My problem is this.
I had a Maxtor SATA II drive installed on my computer which already had 2 hds(ide i believe), one of which was removed to make room. Now my computer crashes at various times with a blue screen before rebooting. Windows reports its a driver issue somewhere. But I also noticed that in the task bar on the bottom I have a new
spot show up for the safe removal of hardware which happens to be the new drive.

So I'm guessing this that this has something to do with the crashes. I just dont know how to proceed.

Any help will be appreciated.

 

This is normal; most PCs will show this with SATA drives connected, mine does. However, the crashes are not normal. Try installing new chipset drivers with the drive disconnected, then hook it up again and see if that helps. You could also try a different SATA port but I doubt the pot is the problem.

 

Thanks, but I tried this. I tried drivers off the disk and off Maxtor's site, but it still crashes and reboots. But less. Could it be that the SATA is setup as a slave that might be causing the problem? A friend mentioned taking out the Maxtor and making it a external drive and connecting it through a usb port. Might this work?


I'm close to going out a buying a new system.

 

I delved some more and heard that the Maxtor model I have might not be compatible with the VIA controller on my system. So thanks for the help but it is going back.

 

I cant remember the Maxtor model(500mb) I had, but taking it out and installing a WD one in seems to have done the trick. No unseemly crashes in 3 hours whereas before I'd hit a crash within the 1st hour everytime.