As a technician I used to see hard drives act flakey but keep working.
It was a warning that they were going to fail. If you can verify that you do
not have a temperature problem (is the power supply fan working!), put in a
new data cable. If problems continue consider yourself twice warned.
As an example, Windows 98 scandisk was having problems completing a
surface scan over the last couple of months. I do this regularly once a
month, and thus was warned that the drive was beginning to get flakey. I
replaced it a month ago before any data loss, and before it caused me any
grief on installing Linux.
-Gary-
