Recently my secondary hard drive failed so I bought a new SATA drive. I'm still using an IDE as my primary drive. Also, I had to use a 4-pin-to-SATA converter cable to power the new drive because the SATA power cable in my PSU didn't reach far enough. After installing my new drive it works great for a while, but then my computer freezes and when I reboot I get a blue screen that says "unmountable boot volume". The only way I can get my computer to work from here is to boot from the windows CD and run checkdisk which fixes some errors and lets me startup. This has happened 3 times now and I would really like to be able to use my new hard drive without fear of crashing.

That error and your boot drive should have no connection to your second hard drive.

It is your boot drive that is having problems. Here is the Microsoft page:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555302

I would run the manufacturers diagnostic on your boot drive. It might be failing.

Well, that doesn't sounds good at all. I'll run the diagnostic and see how it goes. Thanks Jephree

Edit: PS: Does it change anything if I say that when I unplug the new hard drive there are no problems for days until I plug it in again?

Well, after running the SeaTools diagnostic both of the drives failed the Drive Self Test. So now I'm kinda stumped.

If you use the IDE alone does it fail the test?

Yes, it still fails with only the IDE drive hooked up. And that is after running the Check Disk utility at boot.

I would try just using the new SATA drive and do a Clean Install of XP onto it.

You will need the motherboard SATA drivers on a floppy and press the F6 prompt to load drivers as the XP install begins.

Okay I installed windows on a new SATA hard drive cause my old IDE stopped working after my last post. Unfortunately I didn't see your reply until today when my computer was working again. When I installed windows I didn't load the motherboard SATA drivers at install. How bad is that? Also the new primary drive is working great so far, but my secondary SATA is still acting up. After several hours of my computer being on it will start to cause my computer to freeze briefly a few times and then the drive will disappear. After restarting it will show back up however.

In most cases the XP install cannot detect SATA hard drives. That's why the drivers are needed.

This is because when XP was made SATA did not exist.

Anyway if XP installed then that is a moot point here.

So now you have two SATA drives?

Both brand new?

I would check the temperatures.

You can use the old version of Everest free if you have no other monitor.

http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=everesthome

Okay, I checked the temp of the drive with windows on it. Its at 84F. I haven't checked the other drive cause I unplugged it, but I'll try it again now.

Yes, I now have 2 SATA drives. One brand new and one used. I installed windows on the used drive and use the new drive for storage. The new drive is the one that is acting up now.

I was wrong about it reappearing after a restart. The new drive chugged and disappeared, then when I restarted it automatically ran checkdisk on it, which detected a bunch of bad things that I probably should have written down.