Hi all,
Firstly I'll give a quick run down of my system in the hope that it helps

Intel Core2Duo E6600
4gb ram
MSI P695 Neo F Motherboard
WD5000AAKS 500GB HDD sataII (problem drive)
WD5000AAKS 500GB HDD sataII (documents drive)
Hitachi 320GB HDD sataII (BOOT drive)
nVidia Geforce 7900GS 256mb DDRII
550w PSU

The problem is every now and then one of my WD5000AAKS hdd's drops out of the system. Windows gives me a message it has happened, I restart then all is fine. I've scanned the drive using WD's DLDIAG which the drive passes.

Just wanted to know if the power is adequate to run all the hardware in my system? Could that be causing the drop outs?

Can I test by swapping the drives around the sata connectors? Will doing this cause the system to change drive letters and boot order?

I have a lot of documents I dont want to lose so wanted to know if there was a way to save my drive?

Thanks

I would say you have plenty of power.

If you change the SATA lines the Windows letters will not change but your BIOS numbers will which will affect the boot order.

You just need to change the boot order in the BIOS Setup if you want to try this. In other words your BIOS may be set to boot drive #2 for example. If you move drive #2's line to another drive than that drive will become the drive the computer will want to boot. You will get the information that there is no boot drive unless that drive also contains a bootable OS.

If you have valuable data it should always be backed up.

Finally: what is the verbatim message from Windows when this happens?

Hi Jephree and thanks for the reply,

The message I get is this:

Delayed Write Failed
Windows was unable to save all the data for the file drive_letter:\file_path\file_name. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.

I followed the MS knowledge base articles here and disabled write caching on all drives

The full error message shows up in this article I don't have the hardware mentioned though.

After unchecking write caching it hasn't happened since however, so maybe the error was causing the drive to drop for whatever reason. I'm sure it is the drive itself and its still covered by the shops 12 month warranty and WDC cover it for 3 years after that so if the worst....

If I get this problem again I will post in this thread, if disabling write caching worked and I no longer suffer from this I will leave this as it is.

Thanks again Jephree, your help is always appreciated.

No problem. Let us know how it goes. Thanks for the details!