The NGOHQ crew details the reported compatibility issues with the Maxtor DiamondMax 9/10 hard drives & NVIDIA's nForce 4 chipsets. I'd heard of this from various forums, but for those who hadn't known, this is a good primer.

"Some of the effected motherboards are the ASUS A8N series, the DFI LAN Party NF4, and some MSI nForce4 based boards. The problem lies between onboard SATA controller and the hard drive. The workaround is a firmware upgrade for the hard drive."