Boot up problems

[yellohut]

for some reason when I woke up this morning my computer wouldn't boot. What's weird is that I had it on last night when I went to bed, so I'm guessing there was a minor power hit that restarted my computer.
first off, my HDD is connected to a contoller card.
but this morning the computer wouldn't recognize my hard drive. even when i booted using a boot disk, it still didn't see the hard drive.
so i hooked it up to the mobo and it was detected in bios, but still not readable.
so i slaved it to another computer, and it worked fine. so i defragged, ran scandisk, and scanned it for viruses, it came up clean. then when i put it back everything appearewd to be working fine.
until it locked up on me during a game... the screen when black, so when I went to reboot, i had the same problem... it can't see the hard drive..

any ideas?

A7N8X Deluxe
athlon xp2800+
radeon 9600pro
512 PC2100 Crucial
St lab sil ide controller
Win Me

(BTW the cd roms are hooked to hte mobo controller and work fine)

[andyms18a]

what make of hard drive and have you downloaded the manufactures diag software and tested it and if it starts working again back up all your data to another harddrive or cdrw as it looks like the drive is on its way out

[yellohut]

it started working again, but i had to leave the computer off for a couple of minutes and then turn it back on for it to work.

It's a seagate 40GB 7200rpm ata100 drive

I'm not sure what will happen if I have to reboot again.

But I'll download the diag software and check it out...
i didn't even think of that,
Thanks andyms18a :D

[andyms18a]

all so check your system temps and the cpu fan make shore its not geting to hot in side your pc

[Wrnchhead76]

In a similar situation glc told me "Have you tried reseating/switching the power connector on the drive yet? Some bioses have a HDD delay setting, try adding 3 seconds to it if yours has this." But it does sound like the hdd going out, but it could easily be the power supply!