got up one morning and my slave drive was gone
 

Data may be a big issue for a lot of people so I will let you know what I found.
One morning I got up and my slave drive on my primary ide drive was gone the harddrive was there but the partition tables were not. Eventually the problem was tracked down to the onboard ide controller and I installed a pci one. That fixed the drive problem but I still had 20 gigs of data lost. I searched google for programs to help and the one I found that worked was getdataback ntfs (there is also a fat version) from runtime.org also found that win xp will let you put drives in and make them mirror other drives. So if you ever have a problem of lost data or partitions getbackdata ntfs worked great dont know about the fat version though

You might look at RAID for important data, I have two file servers here with RAID pci cards in them, they have never lost data even when one of them had a hardware failure where I had to replace a disk.

It's one thing when it's an error that can be sorted with software, another when you have to replace a dead drive :/

yes I know that the mirror functionwith win xp is raid 1 althoug raid 5 is much better. I usually learn from my mistakes so I am using the raid 1 option now