Haven't seen this before

[mc2phat]

I am running an Epox BX3 with a 600E PIII. I have two WDC 8 gig drives in it. I enabled S.M.A.R.T. monitoring in the BIOS when I realized I'd neglected to do so when I slapped this beast together. The primary drive grinds and makes the usual noises I hear from WDC's about to croak. It made these same noises in my neighbor's system for two years before I inherited it. Anyway, with SMART enabled I get lock-ups and the "Unknown Hard Error" and a restart every once in awhile. When the system restarts, the POST screen shows the BIOS doesn't detect either drive and I get a "Primary Hard Disk Fail." Another restart and it is fine (SMART still enabled). DLG tools consistently shows no errors. What do you folks think?

[EzyStvy]

Just don't put anything on it that's important. Sounds like it's going to die someday..

[Panama Red]

Have you tested it with Data Lifeguard? How bout running scandisk or chkdsk and see if they will "repair" it. As Stvy said, I wouldn't put anything vital on it!

[glc]

See if your bios has a setting for HDD delay - it may need 3 seconds or so to spin up. Have you tried a different IDE cable, and are all the drives jumpered correctly? Power management of hard drives disabled in bios and in Windows?

[mc2phat]

Panama,
Yes, DLG tools consistently shows the drive as being good, as I said in my original post.

glc,
The drives are jumpered Master/slave, I've been running this box for three months now. A new IDE cable, PM shutoff, no HDD delay that I can find. I've got another upgrade on its way, I'll inherit a 13 gig Maxtor. I'm going to replace the WDC drives first chance I get; I used them out of necessity in the first place. The error is not a stop error, it occurs while the system is booted and running w2k.

thanks for the replies.