I had a very similar problem to that described here and this thread, along with many others, were invaluable in my finding a resolution. Out of courtesy I am sharing my scenario and fix here for future generations!

I had an Asus board with a SiI3112 sata controller and a 120GB Maxtor SATA drive. All was fine until symptoms arose about 12 months after installing the drive. Windows XP failed to boot and using the reinstall-DVD/CD I couldn't load the SATA drivers - I would get a blue-screen error 0x0024 in ntfs.sys.

First thing I did was to reattach an old ATA drive to the IDE interface and install XP on that. Then I downloaded latest SATA drivers and SiI3112 firmware updates. I flashed the SiI3112 controller with latest bios.

Controller worked fine (according to Windows) and I only had problems when I connected the Maxtor SATA drive. If the Maxtor was connected prior to bootup, I would get blue-screen error 0x0024 in ntfs.sys during boot up. If I waited for XP to boot and then connected the drive at runtime, the machine would blue screen shortly after connection.

I ran the Maxtor Powermax 4.22 utility (as per Trevor's advice) - notably, version 4.22 does recognise on-board SATA controllers like SiI3112 on the Asus boards (4.21 didn't do this). Powermax said the drive was faulty and needed to be replaced.

This may be so, but I had all my photographs of my kids on this drive and I wasn't going to give up that easily.

It occured to me that the real problem was ntfs which was used on the drive. I figured if I could somehow get chkdsk /f to run on the drive I may be able to recover my files. Question was - how to avoid a Blue Screen BSOD in order to even get to the point of running chkdsk? (This is something Trevor grappled with earlier in this thread).

Then I had an idea - I booted XP without the Maxtor SATA attached. I renamed every occurence of ntfs.sys (the ntfs driver in Windows XP) to ntfs.sys2. It's important to rename every occurence on the machine because XP is smart and will replace a missing driver dynamically. I then rebooted the machine with the Maxtor SATA drive connected.

The machine booted without a blue screen (and without complaining that it couldn't find ntfs.sys!). I could see my Maxtor SATA disk as drive G: although XP considered that it was unformatted (because XP didn't know how to work with ntfs disks without having ntfs.sys loaded). I then opened a command prompt and ran chkdsk G: /F. Chkdsk found loads of errors, fixed them, and rebuilt the indices.

Once chkdsk completed I renamed all occurrences of ntfs.sys2 back to ntfs.sys and rebooted. And guess what? That drive which was faulty and needed replacing started working and I got all my files back!!!

You can imagine that I'm over the moon, and I wanted to share this info with everyone having BSOD with SATA drives formatted as NTFS especially those having ntfs.sys error 0x0024 on the blue screen. This may offer you an alternative to low-level formatting the drive!

Also, don't always believe what manufacturer's tools tell you (like Powermax). The drive may be faulty, and it may ultimately need to be replaced, but I wasn't going to give up hope of getting my kids photos back!