Adaptec vs. Western Digital. Who is DEGRADED? Who is FOS?

Hi,

I have an Adaptec 2400a 4 channel ATA RAID controller with 4 Western
Digital WD1200JB "Special Edition" 120 GB drives. The RAID ran find for
8 months then for no apparent reason, I got the black screen of death,
no beep, no boot, no BIOS until I removed the controller. Reseating it,
the system now boots and the RAID is accessible (I copied all of the
data to another drive).

The controller tells me that it is running in DEGRADED mode and that
drive[3] failed. Switching power and signal cables between drives 2 and
3 made no difference so both signal and power cables seem to be OK.

When I remove the controller and swap cables 2 and 3 on the controller,
the failure follows the drive indicating a bad drive (cables already
swapped with no change). When I remove the "bad drive" from the array
and connect it to the motherboard IDE and run Western Digital's
Lifeguard utilities (latest version 11) on it, it passes both the short
and long tests. It is also seen by the BIOS as having the correct model
and reasonable looking heads, cylinders, sectors, etc.

Adaptec says the drive is bad but WD says the drive is good. In any
event, they don't play well together. Would it be better to attempt to
rebuild the RAID with the existing drive or to atttempt to reformat it
with NTFS and look for bad sectors? If I reformat it, will I have to
re-zero the disk which took all day when I went from a 3 drive RAID to a 4?

I'm using W2k on an Asus A7N8X mobo. I regularly use Norton Systemworks
2003, keep the virus definitions updated automatically and also have
auto-protect enabled. It has never shown any viruses except those found
in e-mails (klez) which it fixes upon download.

Should I just buy a duplicate, new drive, slam it in, rebuild and hope
for the best?

Any brilliant ideas?

BrianP