I have a new 20 gb drive on the primary ide controller of an ASUS p4S533 motherboard with a 1.5 gh CPU running Windows XP Pro. It has a 400 watt power supply. When I turn on the computer the first time each day, it won't detect the hard drive (I get a non-system disk error). It does detect the cdrom drive on the secondary IDE controller both are in the master position). If I wait 20 minutes and then do a soft boot, it finds it, and it finds it the rest of the day. I am wondering whether this is a drive problem or a board problem. The problem has gotten worse since it got cold, and the computer is kept in a cold room, but it oesn't seem to matter if I heat the room or not.
This is what I've tried so far: I've put the drive settings in the bios manually; I've changed out the IDE cable, I've moved the drive to a different power connector, and I've updated the motherboard BIOS. This weekend, I followed some suggestions from people online and tried a few more things:
I tried the WD drive on the secondary controller; the same thing happened. I tried booting up with a different hard drive (an old 2 gb Windows 95 drive) and that drive booted fine. When I reconnected the WD drive, I got the same error (sometimes the BIOS detects the drive but says it failed). I ran Western Digital's diagnostic program (extended version) and it reported no errors on the drive.
I'd appreciate any suggestions.
