Must be my age.

Little Blue is starting to make a bit of a habit of not registering either my secondary hard drive or my Blu-Ray/DVD drive when it boots up.  Thinking about it, it may have done the same with my boot drive a couple of times too, and failed to boot completely.  Usually it picks them up fine on a reboot.

Is there one issue that could cause a generic failure to pick up different components attached with different cables to different SATAs?  Doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

Is little blue a desktop?  If so maybe inspect the caps on the resisters?, do dads on the motherboard.  Sometimes when they start to split and leak it makes a computer do weird shit.

It would look something like dis.

Yeah, it's my trusty desktop.  I'll take a look at the caps, but the mobo doesn't seem old enough to be showing those signs of wear (though I do run it almost constantly).

Just checked; 2012, so I suppose it could be starting to creak at the seams.

You just never know.  I think that is mostly caused by heat so I suppose it could happen rather quickly.  Hopefully it's something else though, most everything else can be worked out, but not leaky caps!

Indeed.  The fact that it seems to be arbitrary drives does point to something deep in the motherboard rather than anything else.  A dodgy cable, socket or component would only affect the recognition of the one component.  It's irritating.

Yup.  Those are usually the things I get stuck trying to sort out at work.  The things you see once every 3 years or have never seen before.  Some days I hate computers!

Power supply?

The power supply's almost new and 800w, though I guess if it's new(ish) & the issue is new(ish) too, there could be a connection.  But 800wtbh?

Try and different power rail maybe if you can? This is probably where my advice ends!

You could have him test the rail by licking it right? Am dead?

Have to tried reseating your RAM. If that doesn't work, try reseating Little Blue's RAM. HTH TBH.

I had a much older-than-that mb drop one whole ide channel due to leaky caps. The other kept chugging along though.

The motherboard in my last computer popped some caps around the PCI-E slot and was corrupting the graphics/BSODing.

I bought new parts (complete upgrade) and then realised I could put the graphics card in the second GPU slot. Still, good reason for an upgrade.

You'd think the slightest short would toast the whole thing.

I had a complete failure to boot today, which was presumably the C Drive not being picked up.  I swapped the C Drive's SATA lead to the 8th slot and so far, several reboots and no issues.

Glad to have been of help!

*Am glad to of been of help.

With the two of us on his side he couldn't of failed really.

Your absolutely right. But their's only so much you can help some one. At some point they just have to chose from the option's thierself's.

Your a couple of card's.