Do hard drives conflict? Strange troubles....

[markjs]

I have been trying to get a board for my system and got two duds in a row, so while I am waiting I am on my backup system. The backup system's C: drive is an older Maxtor 5.8GB ATA33 drive. I put my Western Digital Caviar 40GB with all my data in as slave and when it boots to Windows, everything is fine and all the drives are visible (the 40GB is in 3 partitions). The trouble is, like after 15 minutes, the Western Digital dissappears, and only the Maxtor is visible, and reboots don't bring it back. I have run WD diagnostics on the Caviar and it is fine, and I know the Maxtor is fine and quite newly refurbished. I have since switched to the WD and just installed windows on that for the mean time. Is this a normal kind of problem? What might cause it?

 

[zephyrprime]

What version of windows are you using?

 

[markjs]

XP Pro

 

[zephyrprime]

Well, if XP detects that there's some sort of problem with the drive, like DMA transfer errors or SMART problems, it can disable drives. Then the drive won't be visible anymore except in the Disk Managent Console. But we can't tell anymore since you've already reinstalled.

I used to have a very old HD connected to a newer (actually, it'd be considered old now since this was years ago) and it conflicted. But yours at least boots so go figure. I would still think it was a conflict though unless your new WD shows more problems even in your new setup.