The re-entrant coder

Well, I had another one this time. I’m running a Home Theater PC at home based on the fantastic MythTV but recently it failed on me. I couldn’t get it to boot anymore. The PC would start, show the BIOS screen and show the attached discs and then… nothing. As written here, I have had several disk failures in this machine already so I was suspecting that something in the vicinity of my SATA controller had failed internally.
I had left the PC sitting for over a week as I didn’t have time to fix the issue but this Saturday I finally started to look at the problem. After opening up the BIOS and doing several checks if the disks were present I was just about to give up and buy a new motherboard for my PC (it was an old beast to start with). And then my eye fell on the boot order. For some reason, I had this set in the following order

1. boot from USB
2. boot from HD
3. boot from CD

And then the light struck… I had a memory card inserted in its USB adapter that was sitting snugly in the USB hub. I removed it and voila, the system booted! What I still don’t understand is why my BIOS didn’t give me an error that no OS could be found on the memory card…

My PC that I use at home is used amongst other things as a media center as well. For this, it was equipped with dual disks (one of 300Gb and one of 160Gb). I state was, as one of the disks had failed. Or perhaps I should say: alternately failed… I’m using Maxtor DiamondMax disks, and it seems that these are simply unreliable buggers (according to StorageReview, they are less reliable than 68% of all drives submitted in their storage survey). More than a year ago, my (then) 250Gb drive had failed and only recently I got time to take it out and bring it to the shop for an RMA. Thank god for their new extended warranty (was 1 year, is now 3 years, I believe)…
Anyways, after receiving a 300Gb replacement, I tried installing it in my PC. Nothing. It didn’t show up, not even passing the SATA drive validation during bootup. I tried re-seating all the cables: nothing. I inserted another power cable: nothing. I switched both SATA cables: now the 300Gb comes online and the 160Gb has failed…

Great… One of the SATA ports on my motherboard died. If anyone knows of a good SATA controller (with external eSATA connectors as well!) I’d be interested.