My computer has recently developed a strange problem. I was doing some computer work for a relative, and part of it involved backing up the contents of her old hard drive onto DVD for her new computer. After unplugging the power to the computer, I unplugged one of my two IDE drives and plugged her old hard drive in. I was able to back it up through my computer on DVD successfully. When I plugged my old hard drive back in (40GB Maxtor) strange things began to happen. During bootup, my computer would incorrectly report the name of the hard drive as garbage, and its size would change from 40GB to 48GB. I was unable to boot from it. After some fiddling I managed to get it to work but it slowly became corrupt; files began to randomly disappear and OLE wouldn't work in Windows so I couldn't view pictures or use the Internet. I assumed it was a problem with the hard drive failing. I bought a new one (40GB Maxtor) but the same problem results. From the two drives that are plugged into the same IDE channel, the Master hard drive is read by the BIOS incorrectly, but the Slave is okay. It doesn't matter whether they are set to Cable Select, or to Master/Slave. The Master hard drive's size is always incorrect and the name is garbled (Magtor or Maytor, instead of Maxtor, and a garbled serial number followed by exclamation marks). When they're swapped, visa versa. This is a serious issue that I cannot figure out. Any ideas as to what is causing this problem?

It sounds like a controller problem to me. Had similar problem before but with a IDE controller. I would try to unplug all drives, cd/dvd and plug only the boot drive to it. Also, check jumper setting.

I meant with PCI IDE controller card 8)