I'm still trying to figure out if the laptop's BIOS is detecting the drives or not. this is an old gateway laptop and isn't proving very cooperative -- the only difference I can observe between the dead (or not) drive and the laptop's drive is the latter boots into windows. which doesn't tell me much.

The problems with the car are odd intermittent shorts which just cause blown fuses. even then they've been happening on a different circuit. charging system is fine as far as I can tell. the tape on the drive carrier thing in the empeg is also fine, so if the drive electronics are dead I guess I have to blame the cold. I can pretty much guarantee that 2 of the 3 drives that died have sat out in -30 to -40F nights, and the other one was pretty old and might have been ready to die anyway.

The more I think about it I think this is probably the case. I'm going to try hooking the 30g into the laptop and see if windows will format/install onto it. If it's dead I'll see if IBM will warranty it i suppose.

thanks for the help.