Sata2 Drives on SATA1 Controllers

[Coops]

If you are using SATA 2 Drives on systems where the SATA controller only supports SATA1 speeds you may see issues where BIOS does not detect drive or XP locks during boot.

This can be resolved by changing or adding a jumper on your SATA 2 drive that will limit the drive to SATA 1 operation.
The problem is caused by the SATA 1 controller arranging with the SATA2 drive to run at SATA1 speeds. This is not always sucessful and thus the problem occurs. By placing the jumper on the drive this limits the drive straight away stopping this issue from arising.

This issue does not affect all SATA1 controllers when used with SATA2 drives, but HDD manufacturers recommend that regardless if your controller works or not you should always apply this jumper to your drive when fitting SATA2 HDD to SATA 1 controllers as good practice and also to make sure that no issue can arise.

[Smiley69]

Coops,
firstly I have read a small number of articles wrt SATA2 HDD fitted to SATA1 M/B and all appear to agree that it can be done, as you yourself say. However this swatting up has only occurred after having the problem described below.
Just bought one of your WD Caviar 250Gb 16Mb SATA2 HDD to replace my IDE device. All went well at the beginning, I used WD's Lifeguard tools to prepare and then copy over the contents of my old drive. However since the transfer(Tx) i have been experiencing lock ups at random times. Thinking that there may have been a fault occurring from the data Tx I decided to format the HDD (using WD Lifeguard tools) and then proceed with a fresh install. The lock ups have still been occurring post fresh install. Further investigations revealed the jumper config on the rear of the HDD to limit the data Tx to 150Mb/s. This was inserted post install of Win XP but alas the fault remains. I am currently about to commence another fresh install with the jumper in place. Do you think this will make any difference? I am not hopeful as this lock up issue seems to have migrated across to my IDE drive. During fault finding I have disconnected the IDE drive and SATA drive one at a time to check for any problems and during one of the times the IDE was connected it froze in the same random manner as the SATA drive had, ie literally the screen freezes and the mouse and keyboard are unresponsive. This has now happened several times and I can't see why this could happen. Prior to fitting the new HDD the system had been performing as it should.
My Sys specs are as follows;
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with factory fan/cooler
MSI K8N NEO 3 M/B Bios Ver 2.1
1024 Mb DDR400 Ram
Maxtor HDD 80Gb
XFX NVidia 6600GT 128Mb

PS. With 23 minutes till completion of the fresh install the PC has just frozen again whilst I have been typing this!!!!!!!!!!! Not too happy ;-(

Any ideas will be great.

Steve Miles