HDD now you see it, now you don't.

My pc has 2 EIDE hard drives and 2 SATA hard drives.

All worked well until a few weeks ago when 1 of the SATAs has started playing up.

Clicking "my computer" shows the device present. When I click on it it usually opens a file list, but then clicking on a file in the list causes "my computer" to close and the drive is absent when I reopen it.

Clicking device manager followed by find plug and play devices finds the drive again and the system says all is OK with it, but then the same happens over and over.

Is the drive dying or is it just the fact that I have 4 HDDs?

have you ran chkdsk to see if it found any problems?

Yes.
It says all is OK.

Some SOs shut down the hard drives for energy saving when its idle. May be has a problem turning on after that.

Did you check the energy settings at the SO and the BIOS?

Yes.
It's only this drive that is affected.
The bios shows it to be present.
Lately, every time I start the pc up it goes into checkdisk but then reports that all is OK.

Have you enabled the SMART option at the BIOS setup?

Or may be you can tun some software with the SMART diagnostic.

Or...sometimes part of the partition table has problems. With software like Partition Table Doctor you can correct this problems.

Every time I've started the pc lately it's gone into checkdisk on the affected drive.
If I remove the drive from the pc and turn it upside down, it works OK.
I guess it's dying.
Pity as it's only a few months old Maxtor 500 GB Diamondmax.

Does it have warranty?

Yes.
I'm not too worried about the HDD.
What really worries me is all the data I could have lost.
I'll never buy Maxtor again.
Japanese seems good.
Would that be Samsung?

Maxtor HDDs Rock! I haven't had any crap out on me. At least in there first 5 yrs.

I'm a Western Digital man myself. No issues so far.

I'm all about Seagate. Too many of my friends have had issues with WD drives.

Isn't Seagate and Maxtor one and the same now?

I've been running 4 WD 120GB hard drives in the same box since 2003. Never had one single issue and they are still running strong.

I don't doubt it. Like I said, I've only witnessed others having problems. I just happen to always find good deals on Seagate drives when I'm shopping around, so most of my drives are Seagate.