In certain systems that dual boot Windows Vista and Windows XP, severe data corruption can occur if the Vista installation resides on a SATA device which is accessed from an XP install located on an IDE hard disk. The first hint is often chkdsk popping up when booting Vista and showing a very large number of errors. If left unchecked, this will eventually render the Vista drive non-bootable and produce an error complaining about winload.exe being corrupt.

The only known workaround at this time is to avoid accessing the drive containing Vista when using the XP installation. Known to affect WD2500 drives at a minimum.