HD failure I am guessing

I have a system with 2 HD's

1x 20GB Maxtor w/ Win 98
1x 40GB Maxtor w/FreeBSD 5.0-current

The 40GB is the slave drive and LiLo is on the 20GB master drive.

Sometime the 40GB harddrive starts to spin up, clicks, and dies then spins up, clicks, dies, and repeats this over and over again. Sometimes on startup, the system cannot find the second drive and just a few minutes ago, it did, loaded FreeBSD without a problem, I was in the middle of doing some calculations in Koffice's spread sheet program and I noticed the HD starting to do the spin up thing and suddenly "click" the system died. Then on boot up, it could not locate my second drive.

My guess is that the 40GB is bad...anything else I could be missing?

Yes. The clicking is a sign of drive failure. In fact, I just replaced both my HDDs when they started clicking.

I used a great program called CasperXP which ghosts the images (the Trial version will ghost a HDD to another if it is the same size HDD, otherwise it's still easily worth the $35 price tag) Very simple program with a 1-2-3 step interface.

When it comes to HDD's not being SEEN by the computer, you may want to check your BIOS to make sure it sees it, the HDD cable, to make sure there are no significant bends and that it is secure in the HDD and Mobo, and the Device manager to make sure there is not alert or notice on the HDD.

Best of luck. Data backup will always be a fear for me as long as I'm running "damage self-inflicting operating systems", like WinXP

Oh yeah, the click of death. Or we actually call it a clunk. As soon as you start hearing that backup your data and get a new drive. That drive will fail very soon

I used to have a drive that every now and then would make a clunk and freeze the machine (sorta understandable that OS freezes). It lasted about 6 months after that and then finally died. I still had warranty on it so got it fixed and that was about 2 years ago. The drive is now in a FreeBSD server of mine

That's what I figured this was. This drive should still be under warrenty. I installed it last summer and still have the box and everything. I thought I hadn't installed it, but guess I did and took the 8.4 GB drive out. Come to think of it, I think it had issued from the beginning, but I left to Germany for 6 months, left it in my dad's basement until about three weeks ago.

just a odd coincidence, when i have two drives on one ide cable and one or both happens to be a maxtor they act erratic, try one ide on controller 1 as master, and a cdrom as slave, and the second , install the other hd as cable select, or master if you have another cdrom, see if this helps you, works for me, the drives seem to work fine for a while then when this starts i try this and usually they work like they should.