Green Ribbon of Death is back with venegeance

Adrian said:

I see that you have 2 or 3 HDD's, the issue may stem from your secondary drives.
C:\ drive is always active and indexed, the other 2 drives go into standby mode.
If you use access either of the 2 they have to come back online and it causes Windows 7 to wake them up and you'll see the explorer bar in green move very slowly as the drive is being indexed.

Right, the issue is back , and I think you are the closest to the truth here .
I am using Vantec EZ Swap mobile rack (like the one here) to hot-swap hard drives, although I never hot-swapped while having the issue - I always booted with either the rack empty or having an hd in it.
Now, after reinstalling RC I tried hot-plugging a hard drive into the rack. Inserted the hd, went to Start->(Right-click)Computer->Manage->Storage->Disk Management->More actions->Rescan disks.
Done, the inserted HD got identified, I opened it with Explorer, and then the issue was back for all partitions, not just the inserted HD.

Is there another way to work with racks like that in 7?

Adrian said:

[Are you configured as a redundant AKA RAID?

No, IDE...

Adrian said:

Kookoo said:

Adrian said:

[Are you configured as a redundant AKA RAID?

No, IDE...

So the drives are SATA connected but configured as IDE in the BIOS?

Exactly

I had issues very much like you are having. It was caused entirely by a bad secondary drive. Not a failed drive, just a messed up one. Once that drive was RMA'd and replaced
all my issues and general weirdness went away.

If I were you I would do complete check disk on all of you drives includeing the long winded "looking for bad sectors" check

Yip, done that, no problems found.
However, I've had some issues with one of the drives before - it used to be inside a Maxtor external case, which I threw away. It seems to be perfectly ok now though, and I don't have any problems with it under XP...

Qdos said:

A bad workman always blames his tools...

I don't blame the tools, I blame the workbench.

Lens Pirate said:

I had issues very much like you are having. It was caused entirely by a bad secondary drive. Not a failed drive, just a messed up one. Once that drive was RMA'd and replaced
all my issues and general weirdness went away.

If I were you I would do complete check disk on all of you drives includeing the long winded "looking for bad sectors" check

THANK YOU. Yes, a bad disk was the culprit.
And this is a VERY worrying sign about Windows 7. Why would a single bad disk, which is not active and not even being accessed (on the face of it, anyway), make the complete OS unusable?! The fact is that having this disk gave me no problems under XP what so ever, but under Windows 7 not only did it have problems with the disk as such, but it practically brought the whole system down without even accessing it - simply through some background processes. That's just poor design.