I'm not sure about the former (although I've read lots of issues with the Asus boards at nForcersHQ, it makes me fell lucky I didn't buy one) but the latter sounds like some kind of Power Management issue. It could also be related to the IDE drivers but since, from the sound of it, you're running some version of Windows 9x (the SB16 Emulation for the BSLive would never have been available otherwise) that couldn't possibly be a problem as nVidia don't make an SW IDE driver for 9x, only XP and 2k. You could try going into the BIOS and in the Power Management section telling it to never power the HDD down.
