A8N-SLI hard drive recognition problem

[TheNiceGuy]

Hi all.
I built the system in my sig about 1.5 years ago. Ever since, I occasionaly get HD recognition problems, in the form of a read error before XP boots. I can fix this by powering down, unplugging the D drive (second HD), powering up and loading XP as normal, then powering down, reconnectinging the D drive, and powering up again - and everything is normal. A bit of a hassle, but I can't find any other way to solve the problem. BTW, I am not using NCQ or RAID or any overclocking or modding of any sort, and Seagate Tools showed the drives as being clean.

Recently I bought a 320 GB Seagate drive for more data storage. Since install, The errors have become very frequent, as in every other bootup. And the errors vary now: the original problem; or XP disk check at startup that freezes in the second stage; or missing System32 error at startup. Again, the "unplug n' boot" solution works, but only after several trys, so it gets time consuming to be doing it frequently. And that isn't really a solution.

Any ideas what I can do? Thanks!

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Is it possible the Seagates were to blame from the beginning? I heard that model was kind of buggy.
The problem is getting worse. And now the disk is sounding a bit weird.

 

[Auric]

Noise issues have certainly been reported by others but the other problem seems less likely to be with the drive(s) than a cable or if not that then the mobo/controller/BIOS. Have you tried different data and power cables? Does the drive lose power if its power cable is wiggled (test while booted to DOS floppy or in CMOS Setup). Are all drives correctly jumpered (master/slave or 1.5G where applicable). Latest BIOS?