ok so ive had more than a few problems with my pc recently. First off, i bought a 160 gb western digital drive and got a 200 gb in the box. after a month it randomly shut off one night and when i turned it back on there was a corrupted or missing windows startup file and i couldnt do anything but reformat. I transfered all the data to my 60 gb maxtor drive already inside and started using that til i finished with the WD. I transfered everything back again with the new installation and after a week it crapped out again on the new drive. the first installation was by a local computer store the 2nd was my own. i returned the HD for a 160 gb WD and tried again to transfer everything back to the maxtor and back onto the new 160 WD. the new WD started randomly restarting all the time usually 2 or 3 times a day. after a week there was an error message about a corrupt or missing file in the windows system folder. everything systematically crashed one program at a time and when it rebooted the bios said that windows could not be loaded. the maxtor eventually had the same problem at the bios screen. after that the bios would instead say "warning!!! cpu have over speed" i changed the multiplier in the bios from 13.5x to 13.0 and it booted up again. i reformatted and installed windows. however when i reformatted it said it was creating a partition of 152578 mb on a disk of 131070 mb. when it installs the HD is read as having the appropriate space available, the full 148 gigs or so, but im afraid that im gonna get the same problem if i keep using the harddrive as i have done before. the only other info i can give you is ive been transfering about 50 gigs back and forth and if i do too much it corrupts half the data and the last time i did it slowly the last files caused an error in folder "/????" and then i got the complete failure of both drives. also my processor was read by my bios as 1350 mhz during the message "cpu have over speed" and now that i have altered the multiplier/modifier (whatever its called) it is read as a 2100+. my mobo is not supposed to need to use the controller card that comes with the WD. so any help is much appriciated.

Try to update your BIOS, check your power supply ;)

What I would do first is reset the BIOS to the default settings. You can always modify them later, right now you want a reliable system to start with. WD has a utility that will allow the full use of the 160 GB drive, there is a limitation even with many of the ATA133 controller cards that stops available disk space at around 130-140 Gig. Good Luck Greg