I've had these same types of problems twice. Once it was due to bad solder joints on the ide header. The other was due to a dodgy disk drive that was slowly failing. My best advice would be to check out ide header the player mainboard with a magnifying glass. Gently put pressure on the header and see if any pins separate from the board (one of mine you could not see the separation until this was done.) Then, if all is well there, try using the player with only one drive at a time plugged in. You should be able to tell fairly quickly if one of the drives is dying.