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My question is what might have caused this to happen just in case it happens again. The story is below
Here's my setup:
Athlon 1800+
Gigabyte GA-7VRXP
Volcano 7+
Kingston pc2700 512mb
80gb Maxtor Diamond Plus 9-7200rpm
80gb WD800JB
100gb WD1000JB
ATI 9500 Pro
Samsung cdrw 48x16x48
Samsung dvd drive 16x
600W Powmax

Had this setup running without a problem for about six months until this morning when my computer just restarted as if it crashed. I have my both of my samsung's drives hooked up to IDE1 and my 80gb hard drives to IDE2 and the 100gb on IDE3. Nothing is overclocked and hasn't been and everything is running at stock speeds. I didn't know what it was doing before this because I was sleep, the beeping sound it made from when it restarted woke me up.

Here's what I saw, on the screen where it detects your drives, none where detected. I pushed F1 to resume, then the next screen came up whee it reconizes the drives on IDE 3&4 or your Raid setup, and reconzed the 100gb hd. The next screen was where it looked for a device to boot up from. I have windows XP installed on both drives on IDE2, but niether of them didn't get reconized. So I reset it and it reconized the samsung drives only. It went through the same procedure as above, so I reset again. I decided to go into the BIOS and detect the drives and it worked and now it works like normal.

My system temp is 40C and CPU is 39C. I had a similar problem where the hd on IDE2 didn't get reconized even when I put them on separate channels. I took off the jumpers the hd and they worked perfectly. When I had them on cable select they worked for a short time and then wasn't reconized when I started it up one day. Cause it reconizes the drive at the end of the cable as master and in the middle the slave weather its on cable select or with no jumpers. But now I don't have any jumpers on my hd's so I'm wondering what happened????

Have you tried using different ide cables??? Are the jumpers set correctly????

Check your log files.. Control Panel/Administrative/Events/System and read the errors... I think that's the right path.. eGo

I checked the log files, but nothings there. It happened with different cables and if I put it in any other setup, other than cable or no jumpers, it will work the first time, but none after that. With the way I have it, it works most of the time with cable select but everytime accept this one time with no jumpers

Well if it had an issue failing to detect the drives during POST then iit's nothing to do with Windows. Could be hardware (IDE controller, drives, ribbons, RAM, etc) or maybe the CMOS got scrambled.

I've seen power surges and lightning scamble the CMOS a LOT on client systems lately.

Might be worth flashing your BIOS (see if there's a newer version while you're at it) and reset the BIOS.

Make sure your ram is firmly seated.

You could have some corrosion on your IDE cable connectors. Ribbons also get brittle over time and crack. If you're like me you tend to re-use cables. Don't. Ribbons are cheap. If they're more than a couple of years old toss them and get new ones. Irregardless I'd swap them for new ones just to eliminate that possibility.

Hope this helps...

i have had this problem on a Gigabyte board before -
turned out to be my power supply got a tad weak
replaced ps and was fine again !
and im talking just a little weak !

PSU is possible. I don't screw around with cheap PSUs anymore. These modern systems need a nice stable PSUs.

Antec Tru PSUs are all I buy for my own systems anymore.

I have the 7VRXP and this did happen once before to me, but only to the AtA 133 controllers. Resetting the bios would remedy the proble for a bit, but as FP said, you should try to flash the bios. I havent had the proble since then.