Originally Posted by
Bo Nalls
Have you tried re-seating the power/data cables into the MB & drive? I had a similar problem about 2 months ago in that one of the secondary drives would make a 'clunk..tick' occasionally, as though powering down. Note that 'clunking' in hard drives is usually is the sound of the heads parking suddenly. The drive would be removed from the list of available drives in windows and would not be recognised on re-boot.
Removing the PC cover & re-seating the cables has stopped this occuring. It is possible for connectors to work loose due only to thermal expansion/contraction as the PC is powered up/down.
After uninstalling and backing everything else up, I tried this out of curiousity. It seems to be working at the moment - I reformatted and chkdsk'd the drive successfully without any hitches. The SATA cables that I'm using came with the motherboard. They've got quite a sturdy termination/connector piece, but perhaps they are the problem?
I'm going to buy another cable and run some burn-in tests with Maxtor's diagnostic software to see if that bears fruit. It never occured to me that this could be an issue - PATA ribbon cables coming unseated are usually straightforward to suss out - I never thought these nifty serial connectors could suffer the same problem, but this is my first experience with SATA stuff, and I must admit I didn't think of it.
Thanks for everyone's input - I'll post the result in the new year.
James