Hard disk crashing every five minutes

I have three hard disks.
One Maxtor 180GB 7200rpm (primary master)
Seagate 4gb 4200rpm (i think) (primary slave)
Western Digital 80gb 7200rpm (Secondary Master)
DVDROM/ CD-RW (Secondary Slave)
I have a 400W rated power supply and a KT2STAR motherboard (AMD ATHLON)
1 GB RAM
TI4200 64MD video card
Soundblaster Audigy Platinum
One 4 port USB PCI card
One 3 port IEEE1394 card
Linksys wireless network card.
2 fans.
Windows XP pro

.. okay. . now here's the problem. My computer hangs. No warning, no messages, no extremely taxing problems. Just .. hangs. Meaning. . my mouse can't move, my keyboard doesn't work. Everything is in stop time ( can't even use CTRL+ATL+DEL)
When my computer restarts, it shows that my primary master isn't detected. If i wiggle my IDE cables around .. it detects it. Now. . here's the thing. The Maxtor is a brand new hard drive. . i had the same problem with my old Western digital (40gb one) and i replaced it. I've tried changing my IDE cables .. and same problem. I've tried buying an ide controller card and same problem. Anyone with any idea on what I'm missing. . please let me know.

Thanks
Russ

Believe it or not, I just had a similar problem and it had absolutely nothing to do with the drives. It turns out one of my memory sticks had a glitch in it. When that part of the memory was used everything locked completely. No mouse, no CTRL-ALT-DEL, no warning.

After removing one stick at a time and rebooting, I found that I can not lock the computer again after I found the bad stick.

I also tried booting with just the bad stick and the initial boot would say boot sector was corrupted. I switched with a known good stick and everything booted normailly.

Haven't crashed since. (fingers crossed)

Hopefully you are running multiple sticks and not just a single 1GB, so testing this will be easy for you.

I also see you are running a IDE controller card. If it's one of those ATA133 PCI cards, get rid of it. The extra bandwith from the 133 card over an older ATA100 BUS is ridiculously small. Just use the board's IDE controller. In my (bad) experience is that the PCI IDE cards cause more problems than they are worth, especially with XP. And the simple truth is that a PCI controller will never SUSTAIN 133 MBs throughput anyway. It can only burst at that level for a fraction of a second. Of course you may have some other reason for running it.

Just a shot in the dark. Let me know if this actually helps. Best of Luck.

Also have you tried unplugging all IDE drives except for your boot drive to see if the problem might be caused by another IDE device?

Yes. . sorry. . i forgot to say that. I've tried doing that. I've tried swapping masters. I've swapped video cards, sound cards and all that other stuff. . I've even done it with just the video card. 512 MB ram and the master and it still happens. .

Oh yeah . and I've tried doing the ram thing. . with the one stick at a time . . it might have shown a difference. . i don't know. . but why would i get the hard disc to show up when i jiggle the cable?

I don't have a PCI ide card.. i bought one from best buy to try it out. . when it didn't make a difference i returned it. .