SATA drive problems on g31m-s r2.0 motherboard

[Copolo]

I have an asrock g31m-s r2.0 motherboard. When my OS was on a SATA drive (Western digital) the system often crashed. I have now put the OS on a 40G IDE drive and this seems very stable so far. However, I put the SATA drive as a second drive on the system, and I still get problems on it. The drive operated well for some months, then just disappeared. The drive can be seen if I enter the setup, but is not there when computer is running. If I do a search for hardware changes, sometimes the drive comes, but may just disappear in the middle of doing something. What could the problem be

 

[dude_56013]

Have you scanned your SATA HDD for errors? It may be failing, causing the problems to your system.

 

[Copolo]

I did. Most of the time there are no errors

 

[dude_56013]

And you used the HDD manufacturers boot-up utility to do this, correct? "Most" of the time?

 

[Copolo]

I did not do this one. I will have to look into this and feedback later