Sorry if this is a bit lengthy. My son recently installed a (new) 250gb SATA hard drive on his computer. Had some problems getting the system to recognise the disk, solved by running diskmgmt.msc - the drive then seemed to work fine. He uses it purely for storing & playing music on, all Windows files etc are installed on a older 80gb ide hard drive. After the system has been running for a couple of hours or so the music just randomly stops playing, go & look in "my computer" & the SATA drive has disappeared, shut the system down & restart & the drive has come back & everything works normally again for maybe another 2 or 3 hours then same thing happens again. When the SATA drive disappears everything else on the system still works normally. We've checked the obvious like connections, overheating etc (surely if it was overheating it would gradually work for shorter & shorter periods?).
I've no experience with SATA drives at all - any ideas would be much appreciated. The system is Elite 755 m/bd with Athlon XP2800+ chip, 512mb ram Windows XP sp2 with all updates on 80gb IDE hard drive, 2nd 13gb IDE hard drive used for data storage, floppy & dvd drives with a 600W power supply.
Any suggestions? Any diagnostic software we could run?

you should test if the time is the same.

within reason of measurements.

my first guess would be an HDD shutdown feuture for less energy consumption.

also has Disk Manager nothing to with recognisement. It only formats a drive
and it gives it a drive letter.

make sure you use the latest motherboard / SATA drivers available..

also you could need a BIOS update sow check for that to.

Tks

Therer are two main types of SATA drives, 150 and 300, if your computer has a SATA 1 controller running at 150 and your new dive is SATA 300 you may need to force the drive to run at 150 this is normally done with a jumper on the drive.

MB drivers and bios updates are always a good place to start

I've only ever had a problem with a SATA dvd wr drive not being recognized - MB was too old (and no bios avalible )

does the music play ok on one of the other drives?
real test is to try another sata drive and see if you get same problem
as said already the installation is probably not related
first thoughts are that it is a drive problem