Hard Disk Controller Driver - USB-Firewire

I found out that suddenly all my hard drive-related activity weren't working right, like copying to and from the main drive were almost as slow as USB1 connection and hogged the CPU, only in kernel times whereas any transfer made between external drives, be they USB or Firewire, functionned normally.This malfunction came sometimes with grinding noises from the drive and after a while a system lockup with a blue screen that displayed two types of message, I'll have to look them up again but one mentions a kernel stack error.At first I thought of a hardware failure but this theory got dispelled after I reinstalled XP on another partition on the same drive and noticed everything worked normally. When I activate the old partition and XP install, the problem remains. I checked and tried to update the controller drivers but they all seemed to be unchanged and up-to-date.my config consists of XP SP1 French, on a Laptop with one drive - ask me for more specifics if needed.