Computer freezes after exchanging harddisk

Recently I replaced my Seagate Barracuda SATA disk by a Western Digital
Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS disk. From that moment my system freezes sometimes.
Most of the times it happens during boot. Sometimes I have to boot 5 or
more times. The system is dual-boot Linux (Ubuntu 7.04)
and Windows (XP Pro SP2). Both are affected.

I installed the disk in an old computer and ran HDDTune tests (surface
scan took 11 hours). Everything was OK. I ran the SMART tests. Everything
was OK. Everytime the system was frozen, the SMART UDMA_CRC_Error_Count
has increased.

I tried another port on the onboard SATA controller, tried another cable.
Problem is still there.

Any ideas what could be wrong here? How can I find the cause of the
problems (without spending money on a new motherboard only to find out
that that was not the solution)?

Motherboard: Asus A8N SLI DeLuxe (S939, nForce4)
Processor: AMD Opteron 165 (dual core, 1.8GHz)

Ge wrote:
> Recently I replaced my Seagate Barracuda SATA disk by a Western Digital
> Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS disk. From that moment my system freezes sometimes.
> Most of the times it happens during boot. Sometimes I have to boot 5 or
> more times. The system is dual-boot Linux (Ubuntu 7.04)
> and Windows (XP Pro SP2). Both are affected.
>
> I installed the disk in an old computer and ran HDDTune tests (surface
> scan took 11 hours). Everything was OK. I ran the SMART tests. Everything
> was OK. Everytime the system was frozen, the SMART UDMA_CRC_Error_Count
> has increased.
>
> I tried another port on the onboard SATA controller, tried another cable.
> Problem is still there.
>
> Any ideas what could be wrong here? How can I find the cause of the
> problems (without spending money on a new motherboard only to find out
> that that was not the solution)?
>
> Motherboard: Asus A8N SLI DeLuxe (S939, nForce4)
> Processor: AMD Opteron 165 (dual core, 1.8GHz)

I've experienced a very similar condition recently. The solution in my
case, was to disconnect a usb scanner that was connected via an USB 2.0
PCI card.

Although this may well not fit your situation, I would advise that you
simplify your system as much as possible and see if the problem
persists. Go down to just one stick of memory, onboard video (or a card
if you don't have anything onboard) and a single hard drive. If you
still have the problem, swap out the remaining components to see if you
can make it go away.

This most likely does not sound like an appealing proposition to you,
but the effort will be partly mitigated by the satisfaction of
definitively finding the conflict. <crosses fingers>