Troubleshooting: BSOD: nvata.sys

[at0m1c]

Here's perhaps something to go into the Troubleshooting forum.

I recently bought a Samsung Spinpoint 1TB drive, which I have sat in an external drive caddie connected to my PC via the eSATA port(s) on the back of my motherboard.

I had a curious issue where if I turned the drive on before turning on my PC, Windows would appear to "freeze" for a minute or so and then continue to load; if I allowed the PC to boot up first and then switched on the drive, the system would freeze, again for between 30 seconds to a minute.

Also, when moving large files from my internal HDD's to the external drive, the system would periodically "freeze" during the transfer.

Finally, in the past few days I booted up with the drive being switched on first, and it crashed the PC into a BSOD, pointing at the "nvata.sys" with an error of DRIVER_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Similarly to Chris's post in the Troubleshooting section, it would appear after a Google hit http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nvata.sys+driver&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a that there is a multitude of problems with the nVidia SATA/RAID drivers, which affects IDE drives too.

What's worse is that it seems nVidia either haven't noticed or don't care. From what I can tell, the fix is to uninstall the nVidia driver and use Windows generic drivers.

[Stanto]

According to this article the problem's solved in the latest drivers, or as you say; restoring the windows defaults.

In the manual update dialog, select the Install from a specific location dialog, then point to the C:NVIDIA
ForceWin2k9.64EnglishIDEWinXPsataraid folder. The update is successful if you get a drive date of 1/17/2008 and version 9.99.0.9.