Hard drive will hold data yet not run Windows effectively?

Is there such thing as a situation where a disk drive would hold data and seem to function fine as storage, yet not work properly when running windows?

I bought a recertified SATA 250g hard drive and the first few months used it as a media storage. Then i moved it to another computer as the System disk. It installed windows but after 3 tries it still will give me BSOD errors that say "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" (somethign like that).

I have tried installing windows on another IDE disk drive and it works, so i know this problem is only occuring with this SATA drive. Is there any test i can do to see if the disk has a phisical problem? -0ther than checkdisk which ive already done...?