drives disappearing

Normally if your system seems to "forget" settings, beit time, storage device config, etc, it may be your CMOS battery. Since your board is not that old, battery replacement should be simple. The CMOS batt is a button cell battery, clipped onto the board. Also, if you haven't already, configure your drives to AUTO in the BIOS setup utility. If it already is set that way, you may need to select USER DEFINED and enter the values as requested (this information shuold be located on the drive orwith the paperwork. If not, the mfr's website should have the info.

Does the splash screen appear at all or do you receive any error messages? Perhaps try removing one drive and run only your master on the IDE0 connection at the END of the chain,leaving it jumpered to master. In most cases, MB's don't care which configuration your master drive is on the IDE cable, but I've always made it a practice to ensure it is on the end of the chain. Remember to align the red conductor to Pin 1 on the IDE conn for both drive and interface on MB. If it senses your drive, then connect your secondary to IDE1 and see what you get.

Some drives just like to be mastered, so it doesn't hurt to master both drives on the separate interfaces and slave any other drives to them. Also, I've had issues in the past slaving some Western Digital drives to another brand. If that's what you have, you may be stuck mastering that one.

I doubt it's power supply related, but make sure the Molex connector and IDE interface are plugged in securely to the drive(s). If it's off even by a hair, the whole show's off.

Hopefully one of these will work. Good luck!

Even "newer" mother boards can have BIOS bugs that prevent them from working properly with large hard drives.

If either drive is over 30GB, I would check with the motherboard mfg for a BIOS update.

Many hard drives need to be jumpered differently if they are the only drive present. A single hard drive on the IDE channel should never be jumpered as the slave.

It can aslo make a difference as to what type of IDE cable you are using.
Some mfg are moving back to the cable select style cable. You can recognize a cable select cable by the hole in the cable between the master and slave drive connectors.
If you have a cable select cable, then the drives need to be set to cable select.

The noise from the power supply is most likely coming from the fan.
Connecting an oscilloscope to the power supply leads is the best way to check if any noise is present on the 5 and 12 volt supplies that power the drive.

Chas

Something else to try is to clear the CMOS, also called password clearing, on the system board. Also, if the unit is a Compaq, you may want to try using the cable select option. Some systems like it a lot better than the normal master and slave settings. Hope this helps!!!

Well it seems that the known good drive (brand new Maxtor tested on another system) may not have been so good. Shortly after it too started dissapearing, it started knocking (loud metal on metal) and is now deceased. I installed a 3rd, brand new drive and no problems in past 12 hours of running it. It appears to have all been drive related. Thank you all for the helpful comments that i will keep in mind for the next time I run accross the problem. As I am new to the forum how do I award points in this case?