I have had this very same problem on 2 drives which were tested seperately on an ASRockAliveNF6G-VSTA motherboard (uses an MCP61 chipset). The 2 drives were a maxtor and a seagate 160gb SATA. Initially tI hought the maxtor was faulty, so took that back to the vendor and he replaced with the seagate, but that failed also.
On testing the drives with the DOS version of seatools, both drives passed with flying colours.
I therefore thought that perhaps it is a software error in the seatools for windows software... but discounted this when I loaded the same software onto an Abit motherboard and tested the seagate drive. It passed all tests with flying colours.
Seagate support and I therefore reached the conclusion that the Nvidia chipset drivers were at fault.
Upon uninstalling the the NVidia SW IDE driver and rebooting, thereby reverting to the default drivers loaded by windows, it was found that everything worked perfectly now!!
Thankyou NVidia for rendering my computer inoperable for a week!!
Many thanks to seagate support.
