I had a 13 gb Western Digital AC313000 hdd. Worked like a charm under windows. No errors on chkdsk. LINUX held the key to flaky problem. HD wired as slave on IDE sec channel, DVD burner as master device. Running windows the DVD drive would "disappear" & DVD drive letter became unavailable to WINXP Pro "OS".The 13gb drive letter stayed put like it wasnt the problem! Removed 13gb drive & DVD re-appeared & stayed. A word to the wise. IDE drive don't last much past their 3 yr warranty runs out. "Fortunately", I ran windows backup of drive onto a "newer" MAXTROR 60 gb drive.

MY ERROR was using WINDOWS for backup to a file.
Since I had created an NTFS partition of 40 gb I thought I was ok since a 13gb drive is actually 12411mb. (BTW FAT32 max partition size is 32 GB. in windows!)

The backup file could not restore to a 5 gb partition since it would be considered a FAT32 file. FAT32 Max file size is 4 gb. Linux reported errors under cfdisk but Linux 2.4.18-22mdk could read the windows partitions fine. Burner not recognized by linux. Removed 13 gb Western Digital AC313000 drive & DVD re appeared & stayed.

ALWAYS use LINUX to backup&restore windows files.

Beware of hardware mimicing sw problems.

CD/DVD drives commonly doesn't work well as masters with a slave HDD.

Not really, I have a Quantum fireball 10 gig drive that is four + years old...........and have had no problems with it...........

of course I still keep back ups just in case it starts grinding.........LOL