My SATA disappears on reboot???

[JayAre]

I have a very annoying problem with my new SATA setup.

I have an oldish Epox 8kHA+ Mobo
I have installed an Adaptec AAR-1210SA SATAConnect Serial ATA Controller and a Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 320GB 3200JD SATA HDD.
Running XP SP2.

My first shipped WDD SATA had to be RMA's as it went up in a puff of smoke.
This second one has been working fine for 2 days but now when I reboot, it has vanished under windows. This happened once last night but a shut down, power off and on and power up and it was back. Today, not so lucky.
I can see the drive in the Adaptec SATA POST screen. so the controller is seeing it connected so it seems a Windows problem.

I also initially had a Western Digital Secure Connect Serial ATA Cable but when I replaced this with the generic SATA cable that came with the controller it seemed more stable (this was before my first drive went off for a smoke break!)

I have installed the latest Adaptec driver driver and also tried the latest beta driver but no difference.

Any ideas?

 

[JayAre]

I am running the latest mobo BIOS dated sometime in 2003.

I'm wondering if it's possibly some conflict with the IDE devices.

Is this a possibility or are they completely separate?

This is so frustrating.

In the past 30 or so reboots I've only managed to get the SATA drive visible in Windows once and it was in Safe Mode. It's really strange - even when I could see it in Safe Mode, I rebooted without doing anything into safe mode again and the drive wasn't there ?????