System Crash after SATA driver install

I have a wild one. I received a nice Western Digital 120g SATA HDD a few weeks back. I followed the directions and installed the drive using a floppy disk and Windows XP. It ran great as my primary drive with XP, but a week or so after a flawless performance by the drive and my system, it failed to boot one morning.

It would post and then go to a screen that said, "We're sorry, but Windows did not close properly...blah blah." It gave the options of Booting normal or in safe mode etc. After selecting any of these options it would hit the, "Windows loading" screen and then flash off as it rebooted itself.

This is all it would do. I tried to reinstall Windows XP just as I had before, but just as the install process checked the drive sectors etc it would lock and then flash to a DOS screen that stated "it had stopped Windows so that the computer would not be damaged." My drive seems useless.

I purchased a regular 80g IDE HDD and everything was peachy until I installed the Sil 3112 SATA driver from the disk. The system went apeshit and then rebooted itself. It started the whole Windows loading and then rebooting error and occasionally the DOS screen. Reloading Windows and not that driver solved the problem, but my 120g HDD is useless.

Any ideas as to what about the driver is messing up? Why did it work so well for so long at first?

Help!!!!!