Harddrive disappears?

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StillwaterIT

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So I finally made the switch last night to a single-boot Vista box. I stuck a small 80gb drive as the master drive and a 300gb as the storage drive. I was transferring about 120gb of data from the 300gb drive to a server, and about halfway through, explorer froze sorta, then after a few minutes, the transfer failed. The 300gb drive totally disappeared from view, and even running a plug-n-play hardware search comes up with nothing.

I rebooted the machine and the bios didn't recognize it. So I rebooted again, and it came back up. I tried the transfer again, and it died after about 20gb of data had transfered.

The drive is practically brand new, but has been in use for a few months. The cable is REALLY old, but how often do cables go out? Any ideas?
 
Thanks for replying bro...

Update: I am now dealing with a bigger problem I think...

Current Setup (to keep things simple):

IDE0.Master: 300gb (Primary)
IDE0.Slave: none
IDE1.Master: CD/DVD-RW (Secondary)
IDE1.Slave: none

I stuck the 300gb drive from PC#1 into PC #2 and it worked fine. I got everything backed up then formatted it. I reinstalled the 300gb drive back into PC #1 and proceeded to install Windows Vista. It failed at 0% several times saying that the installation files could not be accessed, or something similar.

I then grabbed my XP cd, reformatted, and when it was at the 'copying files to harddrive' it failed, saying that the contents of the cd could not be accessed. So I get the same error on BOTH the XP and Vista installations, which seems like a cd/dvd drive issue now.

So then I swap out cd/dvd drives, and I get the same errors on both vista and xp, so my cd drive is still good.

I swap IDE cables around with PC #2, and still the same errors.

I then stick in the 'Maxtor Drive Checker CD' and it fails to boot or run. I try the same cd in PC #2, and it works fine. So for some reason the Maxtor Drive Check cd won't run on it either, which it has done successfully before.

I stick in the 'Memtest' CD, let it run for 2 hours, and it passes with no errors, so memory is fine. Not sure why memtest will work, but the others wont.

The only other thing I can think is that my motherboard is crapped out?
 
So what are the chances that my XP cd doesn't work, my Vista dvd doesn't work, and the maxtor drive test cd doesn't work, but my pc is fine? Apparently pretty good. I copied all the installation files to a seperate drive, and Vista installed fine from that. I now have the harddrives on seperate channels, and its transferring a ton of data without a problem, so it's still odd as to why it would have been dropping offline like that. Oh well, case closed.
 
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