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Well, I have been through the wringer since you posted your last response. The Seagate (C drive) refused to boot Monday, so I took it out and installed XP on the slave (Maxtor drive). After doing all that work with the Maxtor drive, I got a blk screen saying something about it couldn't read the disc or something to that effect and to restart. Well, I restarted and restarted to no avail, just kept getting that same error message. Before that happend and after installing XP, I got an error about an ordinal number (13??something, if I remember correctly) and it said something about some dll file. The error message had a big red x on it. Oh, and it said something about explorer.exe. Wish I had written it down. After I clicked ok, it would show my desktop with no icons or start button. I finally was able to use a command function or something to get XP to open up to windows update, at which time I downloaded SP2. Upon doing that, the icons and start menu came back; however, when a storm blew in and I turned off the PC and booted up again later, I got the blk screen with the read error. So looks as if both hard drives died at the same time, which I thought was a bit strange, but if it was heat related because of the close mount, I guess that is possible though still weird. I installed a new HD with nothing on it and got it up and running although I still have lots of work to do on it. Also, I wrote a response to you earlier but lost it because I guess my session timed out or something while I was falling asleep at the keyboard while trying to write. I was up all last night never going to bed, and later today got 2 hours of sleep. So my thinking is not the best...it has been a long 2 days!

I have a few questions if anyone can answer. I remember that earlier when I wrote, I had 4 questions I am almost sure, but not sure I can remember them all. I will try.
1. Has anyone used any of the hard drive enclosures that let you put an internal drive in it and hook it up with firewire or USB? They had one at Circuit City (Mad Dog brand), but these have no fans so I am concerned about the drive overheating in the case. I did look up the Mad Dog enclosure earlier today and the reviews were not too great. However, if anyone has used one that works well and is not so expensive, I would like to know. I saw some that were $179 or so! I could buy and external drive for that price!

2. My Maxtor drive was still under warranty so they will be sending me another. However, it will be refurbished, which I am not too happy about. If your drive fails right from the get-go w/o ever working, you still get a refurbished drive although you paid good money for a new one. It is also a hassle to send the drive back (If you read how they expect it to be packed) and then you have to wait for them to send yours out, or you can opt to give them your credit card on which they charge $19.99 + tax if applicable but they send you the drive right away with all the packaging stuff and a shipping label and then you have 30 days to send the old drive back. Just thought I would tell everyone about it in case you were thinking of purchasing a Maxtor or Seagate drive. Also, Seagate took over Maxtor.
So my question is this, I plan to install the new drive when it comes as a slave to the one I installed today either where the floppy is (because today I found out it has flopped anyway! hehehe) or in a 5.25 bay. I can order a rail kit for Maxtor drives, or I saw some that have a fan in front and you mount the hard drive behind it and slip it all into a 5.25 bay. Has anyone used these? How well do they work? Is it likely the hard drive would overheat in one of the 5.25 bays w/o a fan? I know there are less ventilation holes way up there and heat is supposed to rise. I just wondered if a fan is a neccessity. By putting one drive in the 5.25 bay, I am eliminating the problem of both hard drives so close together that I know fresh air couldn't have circulated between them very easily.

3. Another question, if I put the Maxtor that failed (some kind of read error) into an external enclosure and use USB, will it possibly open like a storage drive even though the XP OS will still be on it? I am hoping I can go in there and back up a few files. I had just backed up some of my files from the C drive (Seagate) because I was afraid it would fail and I didn't have time at that moment to put them on disc. I am really hoping I can access the drive to get a few things. Do you think putting it in the enclosure as a spare drive might let me get into the files, or would it be better to try and slave it to the new drive? Of course, I am also concerned about slaving a failing hard drive to my other (new) hard drive...would that put a strain on my new drive? And there is the heat issue...I would need to get the rails to put it in the 5.25 bay as I am not locating them next to each other again!

4. (and this is not the question I asked last time before my post didn't post) Does anyone have another idea based on the early symptoms (computer freezing)about what might have caused 2 drives to fail besides a heat issue? The hard drives were quite hot to the touch. I was wondering because I just hope this new hard drive doesn't fail if there might be a different reason than heat. I keep touching it, and it is warm but not hot and it is installed by itself at the moment. My only other thoughts were could this be because the gray connector cable that connects the 2 drives was old and was not working properly or could it be the power supply which is 300 watts (as far as I can remember). I am sure bigger would be better and I should probably put in a new power supply soon as possible, but would this have been a severe enough problem to cause the freezing and overheat 2 drives and cause them to fail within days of each other even though they have been hooked up together for at least 2-3 months and possibly a bit longer? I definitely don't put much trust in hard drives right now for storing my important data!

5. And lastly, does anyone know of a good cheap or free (w/o spy/ad ware) utility to easily back up files and folders regularly? What about a utility that can check a hard drive regularly for problems that might be the sign of an upcoming drive failure? And when I did ckdsk on this new drive, I could not read the results after it was through scanning everything (as far as how many bad sectors or other problems it may have). Is there a place to find this log so I can view it?

Sorry so long but a lot has happened in 2 days. I hope the questions in bold help to direct anyone reading to the actual questions I hope can be answered! And thanks so much Valis and Chiaz

1. I use a seagate hd/adaptec enclosure. There are no fans, as the case itself is aluminum and dissisipates heat quite nicely. It connects to my pc with a usb 2.0, and to answer question 5, I use synchtoys from MS power toys.

2. If you put the drive in the 5.25 bay, you shouldn't have any overheating issues, due to what I stated earlier about the forced convection that is present inside the case. Just keep the side on, and monitor the temps with speed fan for a quick benchmark, and you should be fine.

3. Anytime you put ANY drive in an enclosure and connect it to the pc, it will show up as a slave drive. You CAN boot from USB, but it's tricky and I'm not entirely sure how to do it.

4. There are a variety of reasons that your pc can freeze. Best bet is to look into eventvwr (start > run > eventvwr.msc and check for exclamation points near the time of the freezing. Double click the exclamaition points, that will open a dialog box, click the two pieces of paper on the dialog box, that will copy the info to the clipboarrd, then come back here and paste the info.

hope this helps! btw, what size is the external drive you are looking at? I got mine (125 gig) plus enclosure for around $100......