Trouble with 250G SATA drive?

[João Carlos Mendes Luís]

Hi all,

    I've just bought a Seagate 250G SATA drive to run in a shared
desktop at home.  It should have 3 boot partitions: 16M FreeBSD 5, 16M
linux, 32M NTFS for Windows XP.  The remaining wil be formatted with
FAT32 to be used as a common data for the 3 operating systems.

    Well, everything seemed to be fine.  I copied the FreeBSD partition
from the previous installed disk with dump(8), and installed XP from
CDs.  But suddenly, the data and NTFS partitions began to disappear.  I
don't know exactly what were the steps used to crash the disk, but it
happened at least 3 times, after 3 full windows installs (which are not
quick, for my sadness).  In the last one I could almost detect it.

    I finished the initial windows instalation, and booted into FreeBSD
to make sure the NTFS and FAT partitions were available.  They seemed to
be.  Then I reboot into windows, and it crashed, with a missing HAL.DLL.
 Boot again into FreeBSD, and the NTFS partition still seemed ok.  But I
gone into the \WINDOWS\system32, and did an ls.  The kernel pushed some
errors with "bad magic" or something like that, and the file system
locked.  Also, the boot information for the first FAT32 partition has
been completely destroyed, leaving it unreadable.

    The mainboard is an ASUS K8V, with 1G RAM.  I'm running the 32 bit
version of FreeBSD, although it is an AMD64 machine.  The 250G SATA disk
is on the promise RAID, and I have another PATA 120G on the promise
RAID, and a 40G PATA on standard IDE.

    I already had a problem with a previous ASUS board in which the
promise raid could not deal with disks bigger than 120G.  The symptons
were very similar.  Could this be the problem?  Does somebody know if
FreeBSD or mount_ntfs has any kind of disk size limitation in this hardware?

    Oh, I did remember now that I was using mount_ntfs -o noatime, if
that matters.

    Thanks for any help,

	Jonny

PS: Now it has been fully reformatted with no NTFS, using FAT32 instead.
 But I'm afraid of getting into FreeBSD again in this machine.   Please
help!   :-(