Is my K7T Pro2a going bad?

This has been an intermittent problem for several months now. Sometimes it will happen a few times a week, sometimes I will go for a month or two with absolutely no problems. I've been unable to pin down exactly what's wrong so I'm hoping you guys can help.

Here's what happens. I have a K7T Pro2a (yeah, I know it's old). Anyways, sometimes I will be playing a game, surfing the 'net, etc. and I will get a blue screen or lock up (win xp pro). The hard drive LED will be a solid red color like it's reading.

So I reboot the machine, and I find that my drives on IDE channel 1 are not recognized. I go into the BIOS and everything looks fine, but during POST the hard drive (master) and cd burner (slave, both on channel 1) are not there. I have a dvd-rom drive on channel 2 that doesn't ever seem to be affected.

The way I usually "correct" this is reconnect the IDE cables to the drives and mobo. Sometimes it takes a few tries, but eventually my drives will be detected and everything will work fine....until it happens again.

My BIOS is updated to the latest version. I've tried two different sets of IDE cables, a different PSU, different RAM, I've even formatted the hard drive twice, and this problem still comes back. Like I said, it's intermittent, so it's making it hard to troubleshoot. Lately however it seems to be happening a little more often.

At this point I'm thinking that the mobo is starting to go bad...what do you guys think? PC specs are below...first machine...

Have your tried a new IDE cable? Is it possible that your drive is starting to go bad? Do you ahve another drive to throw in there and test?

Yes, I've tried two different sets of brand new IDE cables. I really doubt it's the hard drive, I ran the diagnostics from Maxtor a few times and everything came back ok, and I ran it in another machine for awhile with no problems....