A7N8X De Luxe and dual SATA drive problems

[This followup was posted to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus and a copy
was sent to the cited author.]

I posted last week about VERY slow boot up with this board and 2 Serial
ATA drives. One is a Western Digital 360GD 36 Gig SATA as primary, the
other is a Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 at 160 Gig as secondary, both
formatted NTFS and using single partitions of the whole capacities. A
bios update on this revision 2.0 board to 1007 sorted the slow boot, but
my weekend has been plagued with odd crashes under 2000 Professional and
even the repair disk wouldn't fix the corrupted files left. I often get
"WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEMced" is missing or corrupt, sometimes with
registry hive errors, too. A totally up to date repair disk fails to fix
this. I was wondering if it was a memory problem or a board problem,
memory being 1 gig DDR PC3200 in slots 2 and 3. Processor is Athlon 2500+
Barton at correct recommended speed. Memory is running auto voltages and
at 166 megs. Everything is cool and well vented. I had the seemingly daft
idea to unplug the Maxtor secondary drive, which initially, until the
BIOS update, cured the very slow boot from POST screens to Windows
starting. Somewhat surprisingly all the systems ills have been cured. My
hardware suppliers here in the UK were contacted and they told me they
knew of an "Issue" with using this combination of drives on this board
running SATA. I was a bit peeved as they sold them me as part of the
completely new self build package I got only last week... They reckon new
SATA controller software is being developed at Asus to fix this. My
questions are these:

Does anyone else run this combination under 2000 Pro and not have
trouble?

Has anyone heard of this problem before?

What big capacity SATA drive is anyone running with the WD 360GD Raptor
as SATA primary, and having no issues with?

I do not trust this set up now, especially as the only fix is a total
reinstall when it falls over. I will try and return the drive, but if
necessary will keep it for another system I intend building in the New
Year and just buy a different drive. Am I safest buying another WD SATA
drive?

Thanks for reading and for any info.
--



Best Regards,
Chris.