So it turns out my hard drive is dead. This, mind you, is a server-class drive. When most drives come with a one year warranty, these enterprise level drivers coem with 5 years. I've had this thing less than one. The whole concept behind Serial ATA drives is to be an affordable drive with the speed and reliability of SCSI. Not only have I only owned this thing for 6 months, but it was MANUFACTURED in March, 2004!

This part's gonna get a little more technical. Be ware.
It began with a system crash on Monday morning. Not having time to delve into it, I just went to work. When I returned home, the screen was hung in POST and featured these words:

Verifying DMI Pool Data DISK READ ERROR Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart

After spending far too much time trying to understand what might have happened, I started going about the usual 'my harddrive doesn't work' routine: clearing the CMOS, reseating the CMOS battery, resetting the BIOS, checking all connections, replacing the SATA cable... Nothing. Eventually, I got frustrated and did something bold: a Low-Level Format of the drive using the SATA Host BIOS. I preceeded to install Windows on the newly formatted drive, and the installation went through successfully. I installed SP2, rebooted, and was greeted with:

Verifying DMI Pool Data DISK READ ERROR Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart

Did anyone catch what I did wrong there? I reformatted and zero-filled the drive and that should have taken dcare of any soft defects or boot sector virii... But I didn't run a diag for any hardware defects. I figured there couldn't be any or the system BIOS and SATA BIOS wouldn't be recognizing the drive correctly, nevermind installing software to it. Stupid.

I finally gave in and downloaded Western Digital's Data Lifegaurd Diagnostics tool to a floppy and booted from it.

PLEASE CONTACT CUSTOMER SUPPORT - DRIVE 0 @ PORT 0x900 REPORTED A SMART ERROR

This was followed by the results of several initial scans the software apparently does before a proper diagnostic. My drive failed the first and last scans, showing a value of 1 in each. These tests were: "Raw Read Error Rate" and "Multi Zone Error Rate."

I don't know what this means, other than that my drive doesn't work. Western Digital gave me an RMA and I should get a new drive next week.

End of story.