Issues with extra IDE drive

Hi there, new to the forums here! Hope you guys can help me.

I recently moved from Vista Business 32-bit to Vista Business 64-bit, as I wanted to be able to use the full potential of my installed RAM (4gb DDR2).

Everything has installed fine, and I am very impressed with the performance increase over 32 bit Windows.

Anyway, since the install I believe one of my additional drives may be going bad, as sometimes programs will hang for a brief second, and I will hear the drive plates 'spin up' as the drive is being accessed in the background. It is an internal 120gb IDE drive that I just use for storage (I used it to dump the contents of my User directory to import them over for the new installation).

Noticing this issue, I decided to shut down and disconnect the drive as I am not using it. However, upon doing this the OS refuses to boot, giving me the 'BOOT ERROR. PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.' after POST. After reconnecting the drive, everything is returned to normal and the system boots fine.

I have 4 drives in total, a 250gb SATA that Vista is installed onto, an additional 250gb SATA, an 80gb SATA and the 120gb IDE.

I have checked in Disk Management to see if the IDE is being treated as a boot partition and that is not the case, however it IS flagged as 'System, Active' as well as the standard 'Primary, Healthy'.

Is there ANY way short of a reload I can resolve this issue? Another system reload I want to be my last resort, as it would require me taking another 12 hours at least to back up, reload, restore data, reinstall programs and reinstall updates to get back at the point I'm at, especially after the fiasco I have had with Windows Update for some reason not showing Service Pack 1 in the Update list (which miraculously appeared two hours ago since not being there last night).

I have included an image of my Disk Management window for reference.

Hi

Welcome to the forms.

I believe what happened here is that even tho you designated a specific partition to be the OS partition, the installation procedure saw the drive designated as Drive 0 (probably the IDE drive) as the Boot device and installed the boot files there instead of where you thought they may go.
I've seen this 100's of times and I now disconnect any drives other than the one I want to install onto, so the installation doesn't see any other drive and want to designate it as my boot device. I'll bet if you look on that drive you'll find the boot files, the hidden boot folder, bootmgr, bootsect.bak, pagefile.sys..etc.
You may try copying those files (copy, not Move) onto your current C: root and see if it may boot or give you the option to repair the boot which may write them over properly, but if this doesn't work let us know.

I don't believe that drive is acting abnormally as many times a drive will spin down from inactivity and there' is a slight pause in things as it needs to spin back up after being queried to read or write by something. That's normal operations for today's Power Saving Mode drives.