Problem with adding drives to an established build

[rodgoslin]

As a consequence with having to rebuild my machine ofter a boot-up failure, also noted in my post on passwords on SMB shares, I've come across another problem. Initially my machine had four HDD drives, 2 @2TB, One @ 4TB, and an unused one @500MB. Since the problem seemed to be disk related, I opted to rebuild with just one disk. This was the original boot disk, and on it's own the same problem was manifest. It would only boot into single user mode. I reinstlled the OS, and it worked, the user partition was unharmed, and I got all my old setup back. However on putting the old disks back, Grub fails to come up. There is a flashing prompt with never changes . The only thing I can think of is that the SATA connections to the drives have a particular order. With only one drive, it might bypass all the vacant connections to come to the disk it will boot from. With more than one drive, the machine may be looking at a drive which does not have a boot function. I'm not aware of any order in SATA, or how you would recognise any particular one as being the prime connection. It all worked before, but I might have been lucky in the choice of connecting cables. I really need these extra disks. particularly the one with the four TB drive, which holds the backups.

[filip]

I know this doesn't help but FYI only. BIOS and Grub have different views on drives order.