My second HD becomes undetected!

[Gus Knust]

Hi,
I have WinXp SP2 running on an AMD Duron (847MHz) with 576 RAM, PC Chips mobo, and two seagate HDs.
I have windows installed on a primary hard disk of 80Gb and a 20GB slave hard disk which I use to store music and personal stuff.
A couple of months ago I reinstalled winXP for performance's sake. I formatted the 80Gb HD and clean installed the OS, then I copied all the stuff I had backed up in the 20Gb HD into it and finally formatted the smaller HD. I have done all the window updates and keep my pc free from viruses and spyware (use BitDefender, Ad-aware SE and System Mechanic).
Last week, however, my PC has just not been itself, behaving in the following strange way:
It starts "normally" and all the icons appear on my desktop, but then they flash and vanish. The wallpaper is there, the mouse cursor is there, but I just cannot access any software for there's no icon, no start bar, no start menu. Calling the menu using the keyboard does not work. So I have to press ctrl+alt+del and when the task manager opens, I shut the PC down, but it takes too long to log off and eventually I have to reset it. Then, when it starts again, it starts "normally" except for the fact that my second HD (D is missing and is not detected, but at least I can shut it down properly. If I restart my computer, it might start allright or with D: missing, but usually it takes one more reboot to make my second HD be detected and work properly.
Sometimes, if my PC has been on for some hours, all the icons on my desktop will flash and D: will suddenly and misteriously disappear.
What is going on?
Can anyone help me make this stop happening? Would that be a windows problem or my hardware is about to fail? Why? Has anyone ever seen something like that?
Please, Help!
Gus

 

[masterkeedu]

interestoing problem
Alll i can offer is some shots in th dark,
start with the obvious and chek all your cables, mainly your primary ide, snug connnections.

when d: is gone, does disk manager still see the physical disk? if so just try reformatting through there.

when everything disapears, try ctr-alt-del then "run"> and type explorer.exe
that migth reload your icons and start ,menu.

perhaps try shutting down, removing secondary, booting (allow windows to update harware prfoile)
reinstall secondary, and reboot.

also; althoughit can in theory increase performance, having the page file on a drive other then c can cause issues.
if you have done this, try resetting it to c;

make sure bios is set to plug and play o/s

finnally windows may be able to repair itself using the recovery console, and preplacing system files.

sorry i can not offer any real and solid solutions, much luck

 

[Gus Knust]

It's fixed!

You've certainly helped, man!
I started with the easiest checking routine: checking the cables. Actually I did it just thinking it would not be this because I had checked all the cables and cleaned evertything a couple of months ago when I formatted all the HDs and started fresh.
When I checked the ribbon connecting the HDs, the connector plugged into D: just broke at the first push! I replaced it and... everything went back to normal!
So I guess I did not have much of a problem.
Thanks for your help and interest. To answer some of the questions in your post: no, I could not see the physical disk when D: was gone, so reformatting or any other checking procedure would not be possible. Also, the number of times I had to restart the computer in order to see the secondary disk again was increasing to five times. The bios was set to plug-and-play allright.
I just still wonder why the icons on my desktop would not appear when it started if the problem was in the connection with D:, which did not have windows installed in it... anyways... it's fixed.
Thanks again, man,
Gus

 

[masterkeedu]

no prob friend