Vista Business Crashes During Boot-Up

Vista Business Crashes During Boot-Up:

I have a Dell Vostro 820 desktop running under Vista Business and it?s been crashing of late during startup. I succeeded in booting from the reinstallation DVD and finally did a successful repair after a few failures.

At one point during the troubleshooting process I got the following display:
?File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.?

At another point, I got a ?corrupt partition table.?

Leading to all this I?ve had sporadic recognition problems with my Maxtor 1-Touch 1000 GB External Hard Drive. When I physically disconnected this device, the system booted normally again.

When I checked Vista?s ?Problem Reports and Solutions? I found:

?Address a Problem with Maxtor II/III/IV One-Touch Software:

?Maxtor On-Touch II/III/IV One-Touch Software has stopped working properly. A newer version of this product is available that might help solve this problem. Click to download the latest version of Maxtor On-Touch II/III/IV One-Touch Software from the Seagate LLC website.?

What?s the proper sequence for doing this please? Do I first reconnect the Maxtor external HD before downloading the new software? Should I uninstall the existing Maxtor software, or will the newer software automatically override this?

Many thanks.