Secondary hard drive disappears

Question

I have a P35-Neo2 MS-7345, bios V1.1, P4 3.0 Family 15 Model 6 Stepping 5, 4GB PC-6400 dual channel, XP Pro 5.1.2600 SP3, Western Digital 75gb on SATA port 0, WD 500gb on port 1, DVD RAM on port 6, AHCI enabled, but I have had the same problem without AHCI.
When I first installed this board a couple of years ago it had a 325gb Western Digital Caviar Blue as a secondary drive.  The drive would randomly disappear from Windows Explorer and from bios.  Sometimes if I rebooted it would reappear, sometimes I had to turn off the power supply, move it to another port and restart for it to come back.
I downloaded Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools and ran them.  They showed that Windows was not setup for large drives and made a registry change.  The drive worked for about 6 months and then started disappearing again.  Windows ran a scandisk and found bad sectors so I assumed the drive was failing.  At this point I placed the drive in an external case and hooked it up through USB.  It worked flawlessly for 5 weeks. 
During all of this, I also installed a Seagate 75gb SATA2 drive.  It too would vanish after a very short time.  I blamed the problem on the Seagate not getting along with the WD but the problem persisted even after I removed the Seagate. The Seagate has also worked for months as a USB drive without problem.
I have noticed on the internet most people with this problem replaced their drive and it fixed the problem.  I also notice that in most cases it appears to be Intel chipsets on the board.
I purchased a new WD Caviar Green yesterday and installed the new drive using WD Lifeguard Tools to set it up and within half an hour it disappeared while copying files.  I once again changed ports but it wouldn't come back.  I disconnected the drive, started the computer, turned it off again, re-connected the drive and when I started it up the drive reappeared but vanished again after a few minutes.  I placed this drive in the external case and it has been working perfectly now for a few hours.
Is this a common problem with the P35 and any ideas on how to fix it? 

Answer 1

I agree, changing 2 items can confuse the issue and as I stated I am assuming it is the motherboard at this moment.
But, I also have good reasons for that assumption. 
First, the PSU was installed with the 945P before the P35 and there were no problems.
Also, no other SATA drives are affected other than any secondary hard-drives.  The primary runs on the same power line as the secondary but never drops out or creates any problems.  The DVD is also SATA and is never affected.  With the DVD disconnected to take load off of the PSU, the drive still drops out on occasion.  The secondary drive has worked for as long as 6 months without a problem, but when it does drop out, the only way to get it back is to turn off all power and change ports, sometimes 3 or 4 times and then it works again for a period of time.  You would think a PSU would affect all drives and the port would be irrelevant.
I will be putting together another computer for my security system with a large single drive using the P35 and will try a new power supply at that time, just in case.  I will install a secondary drive just to test it in case the above assumptions are incorrect, but that will be a little ways in the future.
Quote from: Henry on 09-September-10, 02:33:31
I had a problem with S-ATA HDDs dropping out and it was S-ATA power problem and problem went away after getting the Corsair PSU. For some reason it was only S-ATA HDDs and nothing else in the system was affected. Have you tested with the other PSU on the 945P MB just to be sure it wasn't cause of the problem? Changing more than 1 part at a time does not necessarily point to the actual root of the problem.