Did you have a true hard disk drive crash or did you get hard disk drive data corruption?
I'm asking, because there have been increased reports of hard disk drive data corruption, thanks to some buggy chipsets and motherboards,
most likely in particular, the Asus A7N8X motherboards.
It seems that Nvidia, with the nForce2 didn't take the time to make sure there were no data corruption bugs.
In fact, a person reported that the Nvidia IDE driver has a bug that causes some games to refuse to run, because they think you don't have the CD in the drive, even when the CD is in the drive.
I had a problem with my nForce 1 based motherboard, an Asus A7N266-VM/AA motherboard. When I installed the Nvidia IDE driver from a nForce package, Windows XP failed to boot with: ***STOP: 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE and/or *** STOP: 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA.
Then when I rebooted for the second time, Windows XP automatically ran Chkdsk and Chkdsk reported rphaned files all over my hard disk drive. I saw Chkdsk scroll a long list of errors on my hard disk drive and found out Chkdsk deleted some of my files!!!
Never had this problem with my Via KT133 chipset.