SATA Hard Drive not detected

[Tracid]

I have 3 hard drives, 1 seagate which is my main OS drive and 2 western digital same model. A few days ago 1 WD drive disappeared from my system after I installed a new game via daemon tools (I think its one of those rare bugs from software maybe!) which I go oh f____ but I was able to recover it via reboot/shutdown, but when I booted into desktop it was another drive letter so I had to reassign it back to the old letter.

 

Then today it happened again, this time no daemon tool was running but my system was slowed to a crawl while watching youtube on the latest firefox 3, I could not click START, it seemed explorer.exe was crashing or something because I could not bring up my Task Manager. I rebooted and at BIOS it was not detecting any of my other SATA drives it seemed at first but it eventually detected my DVD, seagate and the WD twin.

 

It would keep doing this over and over again (default it detects them within seconds of boot-up) so I unplugged the SATA cable from the culprit drive and tried another port (I tried another SATA cable just to make sure it wasn't the wire) and it booted up this time fine, fast detect and all that. So everything seems ok now, the thing I'm asking here is, what could be wrong? Bad port? Wire? Drive dying? Mobo? I need to prepare for the worst. Thank you for your opinions and advice.

Edited March 19, 2009 by Tracid

[dwEEziL]

Based on what you explained and what you tried, sounds like a bad SATA port to me.

[Tek-Almighty]

Ditto...try switching ports then cables. Sometimes WD drives get picky. I had a couple of raptors that just did not like my raid ports on my Abit mobo...constant errors. Yet, 1 mobo later, they ran fine.

[DNA]

ditto