Trouble booting with storage drive...

[kaiweiler]

Hello all,
I am having trouble booting with my storage drive hooked up along with my boot drive.
I have it set in BIOS to boot from my primary boot drive, and the PC gets through POST, shows the sliding horizontal loading bar in the Vista boot up screen and then I just get a black screen. No HDD activity or anything.
With only my boot drive in place the PC will boot fine, no problems at all.

The boot drive:
Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB 8.9MS Hard Drive

The data drive:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250-GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

It has worked in the past but I am recently experiencing this problem.
Could it have something to do with using a SATA and SATA2 drive simultaneously?
I have tried the following:
Powering from individual rails
Trying different Sata channels
Trying different Sata cables

Anything else I should try?

 

[xenotype]

Does the storage/data drive work in any other computer? or attached via an enclosure?

 

[axan]

try hooking up the storage drive while your up and running in vista, sata is hot swapable so it's not a problem , you might have to go to device manager and hit scan for new hardware to get it detected, it depends on your mobo/settings

 

[kaiweiler]

try hooking up the storage drive while your up and running in vista, sata is hot swapable so it's not a problem , you might have to go to device manager and hit scan for new hardware to get it detected, it depends on your mobo/settings

Seriously?

 

[axan]

yes seriously, sata is hot swapable, i do it all the time, vista can be kinda weird and it doesn't detect the drive when u plug it in, but go to device manager and hit scan for new hardware and it will get detected.

 

[kaiweiler]

Tried it and it works so far, the drive is recognised and all data is accessible!
Not sure if it will boot on restart yet though, making backups of all my data first.
Thanks axan