I have recently replaced the harddrive on an Asus G72GX notebook by larger one and get windows update failure. All similar themes that led to a solution had in common that the installed SATA driver does not play well with bigger drives.
But - which one is the proper driver package? "Intel chipset drivers" sems to be just a set of inf files, and the automatic detection tool does not work (I have tried both firefox and explorer, upgraded java as suggested, and downloaded the explorer plugin. When I try to detect again, I just see something loading for a while, and the same error again so I have to try manual.
The original driver is listed as IcH10R SATA AHCI driver 8.9.0.1023