Heeeeelp!

[LostMyMind]

Since one of the drives is a WD. I would go to WDC Support download and download the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic. This program will test if it's drive failure or not (unless your WD drive is really really old)

It actually will test my non-WD hard drive. It might test your maxtor drive, as long it has S.M.A.R.T. system on the drive. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology)

My hard-drive failed and it told me exactly what the failure was. I was getting the same thing you are, the write failure. Do the test and check to see if your drive is still under warranty (WD has a very long warranty)

[technical.angel]

My problem was I could NOT find the drivers. ANYWHERE. No one else on the web could find them. Hence me spending several weeks on the issue.

[Pedersen]

I'll give you a warning, as someone who just went from IDE to SATA, if XP refuses to recognize your SATA harddrive during format, your only option is to go to Vista. XP apparently doesn't have native SATA support, and I couldn't find drivers to load while formatting the HD.

Actually, my wife just rebuilt an XP machine with SATA drives. The process is pretty painless if you're already familiar with it, but guaranteed to make life hell if you're not.

Steps to follow:

1. Find the XP driver for the SATA controller you have. Might be with a motherboard driver disk, might be on a manufacturer's website. Find it, you need it.
2. Put the drivers files in the root directory of a freshly formatted floppy disk. No other option will work. No floppy disk? Get one. No floppy drive? Won't work. You must have a floppy drive, and the drivers must be in the top directory of the floppy disk, or it will fail. No ifs, no ands, no buts, not arguments.
3. Proceed with normal windows installation. Very early in the installation process, down at the bottom of the screen, it will say "Press F3 if you need to install a third party disk driver" (or maybe it's SCSI driver, or maybe it's F6). Watch for it. If you don't see it, and don't press the key, the install will fail later.
4. Later on, it will ask you for the disk. Insert it, and follow the prompts.
5. Finally, the install process will complete. You're good to go.

If you already know it, no problems. If not, you'll bang your head on this wall repeatedly. Actually got into arguments with my wife about it until she finally saw it, and understood why I told her to make sure she had both a floppy drive, and floppy disks.

XP will not load those third party drivers during the install without them. No, it will not load from USB drives of any sort. Not firewire, either, nor even IDE. Only from floppy disks.

[Broomjockey]

Ok. Thank you!

Would a dying OS drive keep "misplacing" a perfectly fine storage drive?

Very well could. Unable to access any of a bunch of different bits of data due to the drive failing, and it could forget that there's a second drive.

[technical.angel]

I'll give you a warning, as someone who just went from IDE to SATA, if XP refuses to recognize your SATA harddrive during format, your only option is to go to Vista. XP apparently doesn't have native SATA support, and I couldn't find drivers to load while formatting the HD.

Luckily, I work at a uni, where we're licensed to load Vista and XP on fac/staff machines, so I didn't have to go buy a new OS. I worked on it for weeks, and that was the only solution I could find.

[Kogarashi]

Ok. Thank you!

Would a dying OS drive keep "misplacing" a perfectly fine storage drive?

I'm just glad it's giving me warnings and that I (think I) recognize them. I have a friend whose drive started clicking at her, she didn't realize what it was, and pretty much lost everything on her computer.

[Geek King]

Good news/ Bad News:

Good: Your data drive may be okay.

Bad: You're probably right about the OS drive dying.

I'd take the new drive you have, and replace the OS drive first. Reload the OS, then hook up the data drive to see how things are working.

[Kogarashi]

I'm pretty sure I've got a failing hard drive on my hands. Problem is, I don't know which one (I hope ihopeihope it's not both....).

First off, I have two hard drives currently hooked up to my motherboard. One is a 60GB Maxtor drive containing my OS (WinXP Pro) and various system-related files, and the other is an 80GB Western Digital drive that I use as data storage--art, video files, text documents, HTML files, etc. Everything not related directly to running a program is dropped on this drive.

Early December, I hooked up an external hard drive we inherited from my father in law to my computer to back up my storage drive, since I hadn't backed up my stuff in a long time. Hubby had already backed up his laptop with no problems. Apparently the external drive didn't like my computer for some reason, because it kept conflicting. I started hearing a soft click-whirr from the case, after which the computer stopped reading the storage drive. Windows still worked, but it could no longer access the 80GB, and sometimes gave me a "drive write failure" error. The computer also slowed down as it reacted to the misplacement of a drive. This necessitated restarts, often with the reset button on the computer case. I lost count of how many times I had to reset the computer like that, or with the power switch (holding for 5 seconds to power down).

Finally, I went into Safe Mode to finish backing up the files, where the drives behaved themselves.

Unfortunately, since that day my computer's occasionally clicked at me and then lost track of the storage drive. I figured it was dying, and finally got around to ordering myself a new drive (160GB Western Digital SATA drive; the other two drives are IDE or whatever the ribbon cable ones are). I haven't been able to install it yet, for lack of a power adapter to hook it up.

But for some reason today, my computer got suddenly worse (I don't think it liked me poking around its innards and threatening the storage drive--the one I think is failing--with a screwdriver lobotomy). When I tried to boot it up, it lingered for far too long (5-10 minutes on the Windows screen, when it usually takes 2), and when it got to the Welcome screen the drive started clicking repeatedly, about 3 seconds between clicks. It also "misplaced" the storage drive again. I shut down the computer and unhooked the storage drive, but when I rebooted it still took a long time to boot up and clicked repeatedly while running slow (running the two .txt files in my startup folder, loading the tablet drivers, loading up my system try icons). However, once everything was loaded, it stopped clicking.

I'm fairly certain the storage drive is dying, since it keeps turning invisible. I'm worried the OS drive might be dying too, due to the presence of clicking despite the storage drive being disconnected. Help please?