Can anyone help as I am completely stumped as to what the problem can be.
I have a Maxtor ATA133 120GB HDD with 8MB cache (6Y120PO). On high end games, the system locks after four or five minutes of gameplay (this happens with The Thing, Jame's Bond Night Fire, Black Hawk Down, Splinter Cell...). My pc dual boots between Win98SE and XP Pro. This lockup happens on both OS's. I swapped out every component (excluding Mobo & CPU) to see if it a hardware issue with the pci devices. No change. If I put my old 40GB IBM ATA100 HDD in, it is fine (both disks are partitioned with same number of partions and partition formats).

Specs are:-
ABIT KT7 with XP1600.
512 PC133 SDRAM
Sparkle GeForce4 MX440 128MB AGP
Maxtor 120GB on IDE 1
Panasonic DVD & Cyberdrive CD-R/RW on IDE 2
Creative SB Live Value snd.

I have run Maxtors check util and all appears to be fine, but could this be something to do with the HDD made in China issue & how could I prove this????

Check in your BIOS and make sure that your HDD's capabilities are accurately reflected in there. I.E. make sure SMART is disabled if the drive doesn't support it, etc.

If the drive is set on Cable Select, try setting it to Master instead. I've seen Cable Select cause some bizarre problems in the past.

This one's a REAL long shot but I've seen it fix a crashing problem before. Find out the drive's cylinder/head info. and enter it manually into the BIOS rather than using autodetect.

Hope it gets fixed soon!

Fatal Error #449: Unable to process the "Go to Hell" command specified.

This won't help, but I have heard theres quite a few problems with Matrox hard drives. They tend to be more mechanical fualts but I hear that matrox have a good customer service support.

What PSU are you using?

My PC is so wonderful it makes Svol seem less than perfect

I don't know make or model of the PSU. I had upgrading the original to a 350w unit when I went over to Athlon, as the original was only a 250w.