Problems firing up old Apple //e

[thm1@woodlawn.uchicago.edu (Tom Metcalf)]

I've been having fun recently using my parents' Apple//e which I used
to be quite comfortalbe with but haven't used for a while. Its
actually a nice //e system, with an 80-meg hard disk and RamFast SCSI
card. My plan is to eventually use DOS Master and put all of my Dos
3.3 stuff (games, etc.) on the hard drive.

When my parents last used it, the hard disk was crashing often, so I
decided to save all essential files to floppies, re-format,
re-partition, and re-install everything from scratch.

The problem is that it keeps crashing when I'm batch-copying files as
I re-install programs (I'm using Cat Doctor from Prosel 8 4.0).
Sometimes I can re-start and continue where I left off, sometimes I
end up having to use a sector editor (Block Warden from Prosel Zap
from Bag of Tricks 2 2.0.1) to zero-out directory entries and then use
Mr. Fixit or Fixcat to clean up the block allocation.

I'm wondering why the crashes occur often and what I can do to prevent
them. Its a 128k enhanced //e, the RamFast ROMs are labeled 1.11, and
I'm using ProDos 8 v. 2.0.1. The cable that connects the hard disk to
the comptuer is a cheap unshielded four or so foot ribbon cable (the
type that was included in A2-Central's hard disk packages a few years
ago.) 

Any help or insights are appreciated.

--Tom Metcalf