Sata Hard Drives and Vista Operating System

I would like to describe a problem, the solution I arrived at, and put a question to the Forum.
I recently re-arrange my 4 500GB SATA drives to provide better cooling. The system rebooted fine but every two or three days on booting Vista would kick me back to the BIOS starting screen, or, completely freeze, requiring a reboot. The system then wouldn't boot saying it couldn't find an operating system. Turning the computor off, and a restart would fix the problem until the next time. I resolved this by rearranging my hard drives so that Vistas C drive was the Motherboards logical boot drive. An obvious solution. My question is two fold. Why would BIOS find the Boot Drive sometimes and not others (The disks are not faulty), I perhaps don't fully understand how SATA operates, and, Is this the solution or a fix that masks another problem. I have had no further problems to date.

Hi Norm,

When you rearranged your drives, did you disconnect the cables from them whilst you were doing so? It is possible that you didn't connect the drives back to their original port on the motherboard when you wired them back up. Check this, and also check that all cables are securely fitted.

Thanks Dwarf. I didn't reconnect the drives back to their original port. I had them connected up wrong in the beginning, before I changed the configuration. The C drive has never been on the logical first port on the Motherboard. It is now, I have connected them up C - Port 1, E - Port 2, F - Port 3 and E- Port 4. It seems to work fine now. The question was, well mainly for my education, and the education of others if interested about why Vista would boot from a cold start, but not on a restart initiated by Vista crashing? It may well be the answer is glaringly obvious, but I was curious to know if my solution was rectifying a problem caused by shoddy installation, or if there was something else going on. Is Vista fussy about the location of it's primary drive? What was happening to cause BIOS to "forget" which drive was the boot drive on a restart (and know where it was after powering off and a cold start?)

Agreed with Dwarf. Bad SATA connections and bad cable are a known problem. Especially for gamers who has a subwoofer near by as an example myself. The shock wave, I believe, keep knocking the connection loose. I did the same thing you did to rearrange the SATA cable on my raid drives which work for a while and then stop; it happens over and again. I finally moved the sub further and, guess what, hot glued the connections. I am sure any other solution would be better the hot glue, but at the time a quick fix is needed. It has been working consistantly for a while and I also glued my fingers cross together. Lol!

Good point made by both of you. Could have been a badly installed cable which lost connectivity fron fan, drive activity etc vibration. On a warm start the fan and drives would still be working and the problem would still be there. Reconfiguring the drives could well have ensured a good connection.