Hard drive dying?

[deadman_uk]

Ive posted before on here about my second hard drive and people said it might be a lose cable. I havent had time to check inside to see if it is the cable yet but i will soon.

let me explain...

I have 2 hard drives one is a 160gb Western Digital and one is a 40gb Maxtor. They are set up in the BIOS like this...

Primary Master = 160gb Western Digital HD
Primary Slave = 40gb Maxtor HD
Secondary Master = Lite-On CD re-writer
Secondary Slave = Lite-On DVD re-writer

I use to use my old maxtor hard drive before I got this Western Digital and it was fine. When i got my Western Digital HD i put my 40gb maxtor as the primary slave because i wanted 2 hard drives.

Every now and then windows and the BIOS does not recognize my Maxtor hard drive, its like its not there and most of the time it does recognize it and I can use it fine. Its been on and off like this for 3 month now, ever since i installed it its been like this.

I ran Norton Disk doctor today and got this message

When i rebooted , i got saw this....

Detecting Primary Master WDC Hard drive
Detecting Primary Slave Maxtor Hard drive
Detecting Secondary Master LiteOn CD
Detecting Secondary Slave LiteOn DVD

Primary Slave drive fail

press f1 to continue or DEL to enter setup

Now my maxtor hard drive isnt working again for like the 250th time. Is this still a lose cable, is a setting not right here? Is the hard drive dying?

 

[The Bryophyte]

I think your hard drive is probably dying. To confirm this, there are several free hard drive tests around that you can run off a floppy. Just google them. It looks like installing the newer drive and having the other one get flaky at the same time might have just been a coincidence.

 

[deadman_uk]

What sort of tests are available to test my hard drive?

 

[The Bryophyte]

HERE

Several of the hits look good. For example, Seagate and Maxtor's HDD tests

 

[cgrant26]

2 questions; how long is the IDE cable to this HDD? Do you have S.M.A.R.T. enabled in your BIOS?

 

[Milez6]

if you set the 40gig on ide 1 as master does the bios recognize it? if it does it may not be dead. At least this has always been the case with me. personally though, after having 2 maxtors die on me I'm a little skittish about ever buying one again. I now own two western digitals and they have never given me issues.

 

[deadman_uk]

2 questions; how long is the IDE cable to this HDD? Do you have S.M.A.R.T. enabled in your BIOS?

I had a look today and cleaned out my pc cause it was full of dust. The IDE cable is pretty warn out, its twisted but there are no rips in it. Here is how i connect the IDE cable to my harddrives.....

IDE cable plugs into the motherboard, there are 2 more ports on the IDE cable. I plug the port in the middle of the IDE cable to my Maxtor hd and the port at the top of my cable plugs into the other hard drive.

Should i buy a a new IDE cable?