WesternDigital 60GB harddrives have been crappin' out left & right...I had one start acting funny on me as well.
It seems WesternDigital's is having MAJOR quality problems and are no-longer safe to buy.
Go with Maxtor, they seem 100% better in all regards.
IBM went out of the drive business over their 60 gig drives. I, of course, bought three of them for myself and for family members. One of the three died, and that is the one I used RT on.
In defense of IBM, it was my fault the partitions were lost. Before I pushed the wrong button, all I had was a drive that booted with a S.M.A.R.T. warning. It still had all the data.
I screwed up trying to use a Maxtor utility to copy from the old to the new. The utility didn't work and while trying to do a fresh install of Windows on the new drive I accidentally deleted the partitions on the old one. The recovery program did get the documents from the old drive, but it was painful and time consuming.