I have a Windows XP Pentium III desktop with two hard drives. The first one has the OS and is luckily working. The second drive on the secondary master IDE channel few days back was unable to read some files and since then for some time it was failing and reviving intermittently and now it is always showing as failed on the IDE channel

When the HD was intermittenly failing, I was able to copy some data from it to the other drive - also during that time if the system was running and the hard disk failed at that time, the system froze and then i had to reboot.

then I got a new 80 gb hdd similar (same make - seagate barracuda) to the earlier failing one, a new data cable for the drive and an IDE to USB adapter.

the new hard drive i installed in the previous drive's place (secondary master), formatted it and it worked for 1 day and then it also failed - simultaneously i connected the old hd to the IDE/USB adapter and i could view all the data - some of that data i was able to back up from the old hd to the new hd before the new hd failed

the new hd i have tried connecting on the primary channel as the slave disk but when i do that then the bios does not detect either the OS drive or the new drive and the system does not boot

surprisingly, the older (previously failed) hd and the new hd are both working fine on the usb channel with the IDE/USB adapter.

i have ruled out any problem with the secondary channel since the dvd rom i was earlier using as primary slave have now connected to secondary master and it works fine.

i am really confused by this behavior on my system. please can anybody try to solve this for me. thanks.