Some advice:

1) Make sure you have installed ALL windows XP service updates. Service Pack 2 is the most important. Serivce Pack 2 includes several updates specifically related to hard drive recognition.

2) Was your drive set up as a dynamic disk? If you don't know, it wasn't. If it was dynamic, the new system doesn't know this, and you have to manually set it up to be dynamic. I would NOT recommend doing this unless you know for certain that it was set up as dynamic before.

Other than that, I can't think of what could be going wrong. But it sounds to me like this is a software problem, not a hardware problem. Hard drives don't typically die in situations like this--they tend more often to die during a heavy file transfer process, or if they sustain physical damage. Also, a hard drive that is physically damaged for will often make strange noises.

One more thing--do you have a western digital 200GB drive with the 8MB buffer? I've heard reports that this particular drive is far more prone to malfunction than a typical hard drive.