Hard Drives, W2k, event logs, timeout periods....AHHHHH!

[CkRtech]

Yo everyone, what's up?
Alrighty - straight to business:

CUSL2 w/ P3 700
256 megs of RAM
30 Gig IBM 7200 RPM ATA100 drive
10 Gig WD ATA33 drive
Windows 1999.49579349853 revision 23895wdf.b (aka windows 2000 SP2)

okay - I have been having these ODD things happen to me with my hard drive access. I can be sitting in anything from Diablo 2 to Microsoft Excel and all of the sudden everything freezes and the hard drive light glows solid red. I am unable to do anything during this time. After about 8 seconds, the light turns off (or resumes normal operation) and things continue like nothing happen.

Well...it usually ends up with me being DEAD in Diablo 2....arg...

Anyway - Usually an ATAPI event 9 is logged to the event log. (The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period. )

That is with the "microsoft" drivers from SP2.

If I am running the Intel drivers, the same thing happens and I get this: (The device, \Device\Scsi\IntelATA1, did not respond within the timeout period. )

same basic thing....but reported from different drivers.
This intel one has sometimes coincided with this: (An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 during a paging operation. ) Although it says "error" it is logged in as a warning.

The microsoft drivers aren't really good at logging the problem in everytime...but the intel drivers always have.

Right now, i have slowed the C: drive (IBM) to ATA33 and am running both at ATA33 to see if that helps.

However, I used the Intel ATA drivers under Windows 98 SE and never had anything weird happen like this.

ANY ideas? Anyone seen something like this before? I have opened the computer and re-seated the cables. NO change. I have run test after test after surface scan after SMART test after online tests from IBM and WDs websites......no change. All reports say the hard drives are in perfect health. What is going on?

Thanks,
Chris

[SKI]

This may sound really BIZARRE BUT...
how long are your IDE cables? Your prob sounds like bad/too long 80 wire IDE cables. If you're running win2ksp2 you should have zero probs with ATA 100 (sp2 has uata5 support, unless I'm mistaken). If you get stable @ ata33, try changing out your 80 wire ribbon cables... BTW 18" is supposed to be max official length for 40 and 80 wire cables: I'm running 2X36" 80 wire cables on my FastTrak 100 card, 1 HDD per cable, myself: no probs so far. Caveat Emptor!