Bad SATA Cable/Drive?

I am running a Dual 2GHz Power PC G5 with 2.5GB RAM, OS 10.4.1 and FCP 5.1.4. Just recently I encountered problems while trying to export a 5 minute sequence nested with timecode generator on it and I got the dreaded beachball. Eventually the ever-so-vague "general error" message comes up...but I still have a locked up program. Two days previously I did the same thing just fine. I'm exporting to my internal SATA video drive (200 GB with 85 GB free). I can open the drive just fine, play projects saved to it fine, but when I try to export a QT movie to it, she locks up. I ran disk utilities on the drive and it checks out fine. I re-seated the cables and that didn't help. I trashed prefs and that didn't help...but when I went to reset my scratch disk to the SATA drive-- you guessed it, I get the beachball.
My question is: Does this sound like a bad drive? A bad cable? Or something else completely? I would think if it's a bad drive or cable, I wouldn't be able to access the drive at all.
Thanks for any help at all!
Terry

PS - I should also tell you that when trying to open an iDVD project saved to the drive, that program locks up as well. This makes me lean to thinking it's a bad drive or cable. Also, when I try to run disk utilities after the beachball without re-booting, disk utilities just spins with "gathering disk information". Finally it says it's ready, but then when I try to verify, I get "Verify volume failed with error Could not unmount disk." But after a fresh restart, it's fine. Uggghhh!

Is this your boot drive or a separate SATA drive? If you are doing this for iDVD, why aren't you exporting a Quicktime Reference file instead? What is the codec in the timeline (Sequence Settings)?

If I were you, I would back up everything on that unit to a Firewire drive post haste before it eats itself (sounds like that's what's happening).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Also, run diskwarrior on your machine. It sounds like it's getting flakey.

This is a second drive, not my boot drive. It's a Maxtor 200GB SATA. It doesn't matter if I export a self-contained movie or a reference file...either way she locks up! It seems whatever data I try to put on or take off that drive locks her up...but when I initially power up, I can access the files on there fine. Just when trying to do something after that is where the problems start.
The sequence settings for the timeline are DV/DVCPRO-NTSC....which has never changed.

I think I'll be trying Disc Warrior and see if I can't save the drive! If that doesn't help, looks like it's drive-shopping time!

Thanks for the help!
Terry

Hey terry,
Everything you've mentioned thats working is when your reading from the drive - but when your trying to export your qt its writing to the drive, so it would be good to work out whether its a fcp issue or a drive issue. Have you tried copying some files to the drive from the finder etc and checking read/write from outside of FCP? -

Tell me to shut up if you've tried this and im not reading but if it only hangs in fcp have you trashed cache's and prefs, and if its a computer wide issue have you or can you try re-formatting the drive?