Hi Engineer - sorry, I missed your question first time round.
Unfortunately, we didn't note the exact workding of the BSOD. It was something along the lines of "Windows has detected a problem and is shutting down' followed by a series of numbers and letters that were very confusing.
The mother board is an MSI K76V with an Athlon 1800 cpu.
When we do the f6 thing, we've tried a variety of drivers - the floppy that came with the MOBO only had one driver which gave a BSOD, then we downloaded the latest drivers from the MSI website, dug around on the Maxtor site and tried a few third party via drivers too - all with the same results.
I wonder - why have Msoft insisted that the only way to load a Sata or Raid driver is via a floppy. As far as I can tell this is the only point where XP requires the use of such old hardware (take me back to my first laptop - a two floppy Toshiba, lasted for years and never let me down).