Okay... I know it's *possible* but 3 dead or dying drives in the two months? I run multiple drives off an Asus P4P800 motherboard. The drives it doesn't have room for are run from Promise Ultra133TX controller cards. The drives in question aren't anywhere near old - the oldest is about a year and a half. I've tried different IDE cables - even known good cables from an other computer. I've tried reinstalling the drivers for the controller cards they're on. I've moved the controller cards to different PCI slots and even tried moving different pairs of drives to different channels on the cards. I've checked all the rails on both power supplies - One Antec 550 Truepower and a 430 Truepower - to make sure everything's getting enough juice. All good there. Heat isn't an issue - I run so many fans it sounds like an appliance store in here and the drives are actually cool to the touch. Chkdsk has found no problems on any of my drives. I've run tests on all my RAM - no problems there. This is about the third install of the operating system since the trouble began - the last install was even from scratch - not rebuilt from an image.
And yet, I still have (another) drive that hangs explorer up. Go to open the drive and it takes anywhere from a minute to 3 minutes to appear. In the meantime, that disables my quicklaunch bar - can't open anything from it 'til the drive decides to appear. Once it finally opens, and while trying to transfer the files to another drive, it hangs in the transfer. I've tried letting the file transfer run for up to 10 minutes but it just hangs. Clicking Cancel takes a few minutes to complete but it does "settle down" - don't have to do a hard shutdwon. Double clicking on My Computer while any of this is going on and that, too, doesn't finish- I get about half my drives showing. The big question is, what else can I look for? What am I missing here?

That doesn't sound like a drive dying to me.
Sounds more like a resource allocation issue.

Please post how your drives are configured [m/sl or cs]and what controller cards they are on. Also include what irqs each controller is on.

Give a person a fish you feed them for a day.
Ask a person to internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

Wanderer-
I'll ask you to kindly bear with me on this. As usual, I'm in over my head with this stuff. With no one around to turn to for learning the oh-so-lovely world of WinDoze, forums like this are all I've got to plod ahead with.
Anyway... I know the drives are configured as master/slave and they're on Promise Ultra 133TX cards. Unfortunately, even if the drives were available right now (they're not), I'm not sure how to determine what IRQ they're on. I rebooted and went through the BIOS, then after finally getting WIndows going again (see below) I went through everything I could find in Device Manager. I guess I just don't know what to look for or where to find it.
The drives aren't available because my computer is now booting up and looks like it's omitting the part of the bootup where it detects the drives on the cards. What really baffles me is that I have four other drives on another card and they ARE showing. I also might mention that I just had to reboot twice just to be able to get back here- the first time I booted up to explorer Hell. Right clicked on My Computer and nothing happened. Quicklaunch bar dead. Ctrl-alt-del to try to shutdown and got the access denied message when I tried to restart. Waited 5 minutes, then the dreaded hard shutdown.

Go into the bios and disable fast booting. Have your finger over the pause key so upon bootup you can stop the bios summary screen. It will list the devices and their irqs.

Please list the drives and the controllers they are attached to.

Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

wanderer-
I think I see where this is heading - something else to learn - like assigning IRQs.
One controller's on IRQ 5, the other on 10. And it's been drives using 10 that have been giving me problems. I assume because there's also my VGA, the ethernet adapter, the firewire adapter AND 2 USB adapters all using it? But, even if this is the case, why is just the same channel within the card that seems to give me trouble? The other pair on the same card are fine.
And I definitely want to thank you for the follow-ups here! As always, Windoze is more than a bit frustrating when you're more or less stabbing in the dark (He laughs)

Welcome to plug and play. Yes I have run into just this and have controllers act flakey for good reason.

Things to try;
1. Move the card to another slot [one that isn't shared - consult mb docs]
2. Disable all unused devices in the bios. If not using serial ports, firewire,etc then disable it, for example. This may free up more resources to be available but sometimes its just hard coded in the bios.
3. Switch slots with the working card. See if the problem is slot or card.

Lets see where this takes us. Always happy to help.

Give a person a fish you feed them for a day.
Ask a person to internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

To a most helpful wanderer -
I did what you said and checked the IRQ assignments and didn't like what I saw. It may be too soon to tell for sure but, because the BIOS on my mobo doesn't allow for assigning IRQs (thinking new mobo now), I decided to let the O/S handle Plug n Play and so far everything seems okay. I went into Device Manager and saw everything nice and spread out - separate slots for everything. Haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet, but, so far, file transfers and such aren't locking anything up. I'll thank you again for your help on this and hope I won't need your expertise anytime soon. : - )

Off again to the wunnerful world o' Windoze...