System crashes whenever I plug in a SATA drive.

[Rurik]

Interesting problem that started about 3-4 months ago. I use a SATA tray to swap a hard drive in and out to work. We have about 300 of these trays at work, so I bought an identical one for home.

Now, every time I plug a hard drive into it XP will pick up on the drive. It will do the initial directory scan, and then the system will crash. Each and every time I put a SATA drive in. But, once the system comes back up the drive works perfectly fine and I can write/read and unmount it fine.

Error codes I'm getting:

Error code 0000009c, parameter1 00000004, parameter2 8086f1f0, parameter3 b2000000, parameter4 00070f0f.

BCCode : 9c BCP1 : 00000004 BCP2 : 8086F1F0 BCP3 : B2000000
BCP4 : 00070F0F OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 256_1

N:\Temp\WER5eb6.dir00\Mini081408-01.dmp
N:\Temp\WER5eb6.dir00\sysdata.xml

Any ideas of what I can check?

[djBon2112]

That's a machine check exception, and it's not good. SATA controller problem could be the most likely issue. It might not be properly supporting hotswapping and therefore crashing Windows when it loads.

[sabregen]

check your SATA controller's specs, make sure it can support hot plugging drives. Aside from that, I'm inclined to agree that it may be a faulty controller.

[Rurik]

The controller is on-board the A8N32-SLI motherboard, and it does support hot plugging. This all worked for a number of months just fine and then just stopped inexplicably. And, once the system comes back up the drive works and even shows up in the "Safely Remove Hardware" list.

[Lazn_Work]

Did you change nforce or sata drivers since it worked? Because supporting hotswap isn't just a hardware issue, the drivers have to support it as well and I know several versions of Nvidia SATA drivers don't support it. (or don't properly support it)

[nitrobass24]

Is AHCI enabled on this system? if not try enabling it or if it is try disabling it.

Also what is this "tray" that you have? links?

[Rurik]

Hmm, nothing in the BIOS about AHCI. I'm not sure if I installed the drivers or not; I built this two years. It may be about time to reinstall XP (SP2). I forced a new install of the SATA drivers for my mobo, but that didn't help. I tried to update the BIOS, but the Asus BIOS updater keeps downloading corrupted. I'm using the onboard SATA and not the Silicon Image 3132 chipset.

I have a tray-less SATA bay now (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998020). It works excellent, and we have a few hundred at work for continually swapping drives in and out.