Windows 7 corrupting XP drive?

I have a user who recently installed Windows 7 rc (7100) on a seperate drive to his main XP drive - he did the installation with the XP drive unplugged and then once everything was set up re-connected the drive on a different sata port than before (as the windows 7 drive was now using the sata-1 connection).

He said everything was fine until this morning when he couldn't log back into xp due to a corrupted drive error message (0x00000024), claiming he should run chkdsk /f to fix the issue.

Unable to boot into XP, he booted into windows 7 and fixed the disk from there which at first seemed to fix the issue - however after rebooting into XP successfully the domain login won't allow anyone to connect to the domain.

I logged in locally, disconnected and reconnected the machine to the domain and the problem went away - chkdsk doesn't report any further issues.

Realising the version of windows 7 is a release "candidate" I was suprised it was capable of corrupting a drive simply by reading it! The user claims the errors appeared before he'd even tried opening or viewing any of the files on the XP drive.

Is this a known fault or did he do somthing wrong? Apparently he needs it to test some applications against but I can't trust it from damaging his XP parition.

Cheers, Chris

Just because the user didn't access any files doesn't mean the operating system or some other service didn't, nor that the OS didn't go to update the file tables or some-such.

I'd hope that W7 would realize the version of NTFS on the drive was older and only manipulate it to that level (as I seem to recall Vista and W7 have some changes to the filesystem), however I wouldn't make that assumption for critical data.

Additionally, it could also be related to different meaning of ACLs in the two OS instances. I don't KNOW that it does but it COULD. I personally would not trust the two OS instances to ahve the same ACL "values" for everything even if they are same-named machine in the Domain.

The ACL issue is a nitpick that I've had to clean up with an external USB drive that is NTFS formatted (originaly on XP) as I've moved through Vista and now onto W7 ... having to use an Administrative Shell to process the drive and grant full authority to my "new" user id.