I have a hard drive problem (80 gig IBM Deskstar IDE). My drive intermittently disappears. It will sometimes be recognized in the BIOS and sometimes not. I replaced the power supply (up to 500 watts, much more than needed i think), but had the same problems. On the original mobo, when it was occassionally recognized, it would boot through to windows fine, and, at some point during usage the comp would randomly freeze (usually when accessing the HDD). I installed it to a different mobo, cpu, and replaced the IDE cables, and it was recognized the first time i started it up, but the system froze on the windows log in screen. Now, with the replacement mobo, it has the same problem of only being intermittently detected, and, if it is detected, it freezes on the log-in screen every time. I have run the diagnostic software for the drive, but it the drive will usually disappear during the tests and/or repairs :). I think the hard drive is probably dead, but does anyone have any other ideas before I spend the cash? And, is it worth it to go to a SATA drive?

There is no appreciable difference between PATA and SATA drives, besides the price. Do yourself a favor BACKUP! Sorry, I do not check for private messages

Did you try a repair install of XP? A motherboard replacement, cpu change, memory size change etc will screw things up for XP users. You just can't move a hdd running XP to a different machine. Skip

Yeah, a while ago, but the computer freezes during the repair. :( When it reboots, HDD once again missing. Thanks, tho.

You could try a diagnostic from the IBM site. It 'might' be able to fix it up by re-assigning bad sectors as long as there aren't too many. Do yourself a favor BACKUP! Sorry, I do not check for private messages

Backup, backup, backup... then worry about fixing your drive. "If it ain't broke, upgrade anyway."