an intermittent problem is not easy to resolve, when i suggest to try other hardware i don't mean to rush you to the nearest computer store and buy stuff from them. unless you felt like buying anything yourself of course. but now that we have 3 unrecognized drives we have some spares to play with. from what i understand from your story is that your IDE drives are recognized OK. (every time?) and your SATA drive not always. is this the case? we must also realize that this mother board you are using is an old one, where has it been all its life? have the SATA connectors ever been used before you? (if yes, did it work properly then?) i think a carefully performed cleaning of contacts from your cabling and MOBO is always a good thing. if you have any spare cables or other parts, try swapping them. I have had experience with some older boards that can't run SATA and IDE (PATA) simultaneously. is your board one of those? read your manual if you are not sure. the there is always the consideration of a BIOS upgrade, that can sometimes work miracles, but also disaster such as a power interruption during the process of flashing (reloading software onto the BIOS chip), it renders a motherboard pretty much useless. to be a little on the save side see if you can back up your old BIOS before you start flashing it. in case the upgrade gives more bad than good. to know this info at forehand you can look up the mobo's bios release notes to see if your problem is a known problem and resolved in a new(er) release. the advice is not to upgrade your BIOS if your old one works fine. i think your problem may be BIOS related, but it could also be faulty hardware (in which case i suspect your motherboard).
here's a link to asus' website for your board:
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?mo...=13&l3=60&l4=0
good luck