IDE hard drives acting funny.

[McWilloughby]

I recently rebuilt (to clean) my system and reinstalled windows. Since then, my two IDE hard drives have been acting really... odd.
System Specs:
C2D E8300
4GB DDR2 800
Asus P5Q
One of the IDE drives is a 120GB Seagate Barracuda and the other is a 160GB WDC.
Windows 7

For starters, the Marvel IDE screen on the BIOS generally takes about 30 seconds to find the discs or whatever it is (I've tried changing the time it allows for a search to 5 and 0 seconds but it still spends a long time on that screen) and secondly, when I access the drives on windows, it a small amount of time for me to actually be able to look in any of the folders on the discs (sort of similar to when you have a CD in your drive that isn't spinning, I hear the drive start to spin when I start opening folders on it). As far as I remember the jumpers on the drives are set to cable select and my Windows installation is on a seperate SATA drive. Also, on my old installation, Hardware Monitor would give a temperature reading for the two IDE drives but now it only gives one for the SATA.

If it's just something to do with the behaviour of a SATA based system with IDE drives then it's not the end of the world, I'm just worried that one/both of the drives may be dying.

[CaptainCrash]

Try unplugging and reseating the IDE ribbon cable, and if that doesn't work swap it for a new one - they can be temperamental things, and you may have caused it some unseen damage when you dismantled/rebuilt the PC.

It may also help if you jumper the drives specifically as master and slave, rather than CS, although it's a bit of a long shot if they were both working fine as CS before - have the master on the end connector, and the slave in the middle.

[peterb]

As Captain Crash says. Did you pull on the cable to remove the plug from the drive or mobo? (often no alternative tbh)

Chances are that one of the data cables has pulled free from the insulation displacement tine in the connector. Depending on the design, you can sometimes fix it by squeezing the connector in a vise (top to bottom) but better to replace it.

[McWilloughby]

Replacing the cable won't be an issue, just more of a time thing in than I'm at uni and my cables are in my parent's house. I'll see what happens when I have the jumpers set to master and slave.