HDD's dying or bad cables??

[brianosaur]

Been having intermittent problems with my hard drives.
I have five sata hdds and two are pretty old (6yrs?)
Device manager sometimes recognizes them sometimes not.

Prob is it happens with more then one drive. All can be working fine (o/s running & drives working), then I look at explorer & dev mgr and suddenly a drive has mysteriously 'disappeared'.

On top of that, now when I booted Vista64x it hangs at the desktop startup and gives me a never ending hourglass cursor.

I changed bios settings from sata "auto detect" to "not detected" for all hdds but the o/s drive. Vista boots and to my suprise shows most of the hdds. (even the 'not detected' setting ones)

I assume its either sata cable issues or one or more of the drives is dying.

Whats the best way to narrow down this problem?
--- decent open source software hdd checker?
--- any way to 'test' cables?
--- good name new sata cables instead of my generic red ones?

[quartet-man]

You need to use each drive's own manufacturer's software to check them.