Windows keeps changing the order of my hard disks

[gbswales]

About 6 months ago I rebuilt my system which now has

INTERNALLY
128GB Corsair SSD = C Drive plus unlettered boot partition
2TB Samsung drive split into two partitions which is storage and truecrypt area (the first partition is my data drive)
2TB Samsung drive (media and films)
250GB western digital which is my system back up drive for main and incremental backups

EXTERNALLY (permenantly connecte)
3TB Go Flex drive which is my data back up
2GB flash drive for a specific programme that runs from it

I use Paraagon Back up and recovery 10.2 (free edition)
with a system drive back up and alternat daily incremental back ups scheduled

After a few days of running the back ups successfully I wake up to find an invalid partition messag. Which I eventually traced back to the SSD drive (still happily working as boot and system disk) which in Disc Mananger (win 7 pro) had changed drive number at the last reboot. For some reason it was showing as drive 2 but had changed back to drive 0 as I would expect it to be. So ran a new back up, set new scheduled incremental and again this ran fine for 3 back ups - until I had occasion to turn my PC off. The next time the back up ran I got the same error message and found the drive had switched back to being drive 2 again.

I have not done anything (other than reboot) that should change this
The discs show in the right order in the BIOS and are set in the right boot sequence as well CDROM/SDD/HDD

The SSD is the master on SATA port 2 one of the 2TB is slave on the same port
the other two hard drives are master and slave on SATA port 3 - they were simply connceted to the most accessible ports but I made sure the SSD was first in the sequence. zero is used up by the IDE Optical drives (master and slave) and both ports 1 are empty

I am fanatical about backing up and so concerned about it failing like this. There has been previous thread but was nearly a year old so it reccommended a new one.

It is a gigabyte motherboard (fairly new) with an AMD dual core processor (the other article reccommended an intel specific fix so didnt help)

any ideas as how I can FIX the drive numbers - I really dont care if it is showing as 0 or 2 just as long as it always stays the same

 

[gregrocker]

Please post back a screenshot of your maximized Disk Management drive map and listings:

1. Type Disk Management in Start Search box.
2. Open Disk Mgmt. window and maximize it.
3. Type Snipping Tool in Start Search box.
4. Open Snipping Tool, choose Rectangular Snip, draw a box around full map and all listings.
5, Save Snip, attach using paper clip in Reply Box.

Tell us what is on each partition if they are not labeled or label them in the Explorer Properties box of each.

 

[alphanumeric]

The SSD is the master on SATA port 2 one of the 2TB is slave on the same port
the other two hard drives are master and slave on SATA port 3 - they were simply connceted to the most accessible ports but I made sure the SSD was first in the sequence. zero is used up by the IDE Optical drives (master and slave) and both ports 1 are empty

Master, Slave ? IDE used Master, Slave on the one cable, but SATA? Don't they each have their own port and don't have jumpers. One drive per cable per port?

 

[gbswales]

Response to answers

Thanks (both) for responses - I have attached a screenshot of the full disc manager - it doesnt all fit on the screen but the only things below are the two physical and one virtual optical drives both on IDE. Today the C drive is correctly shown as Drive 0 so the back up runs. However as you can see from the other screenshots it can alternate between being drive 0 and drive 2 - the only thing that happened between these two screen shots was a system restart. Looking at the screenshots I notice that other drives randomly change letters too

Sorry I did realise that they were not actually master a slave drives, being SATA, but this is simply how they labelled in the BIOS - I will restart my system now and post a list of how they appear in BIOS

 

[gbswales]

BIOS screenshot

I have attached a photo of the BIOS screen
The ordering here never changes with the SSD at channel 2
the next one is the back up drive which is an older drive so may be slower to read than the others and the two samsungs come next - I dont know which is which because they are identical drives. On this reboot the ordering remained OK

ADDED two more shots from BIOS screen showing boot order and HD disc order

 

[alphanumeric]

That's weird how the BIOS lists the SATA ports as IDE Channel master and Slave? I've never seen that before. Maybe because the BIOS is set to IDE mode instead of AHCI mode? How old is that Motherboard, what's the make and model number? It looks like two whole channels are swapping. Disk 0 and 1 become 2 and 3, while 2 and 3 become 1 and 2. IDE Channel 2 and 3 get reversed somehow. The drives are getting detected in the wrong order during the post. BIOS battery low maybe? I think I would reset the BIOS to failsafe defaults and then manually set your date, time, boot order etc.

 

[gbswales]

When I read your message it reminded me of something I had seen in the BIOs once but since I didnt understand it I had left it alone.
The integrated peripherals screen had the settings shown in image 1 but I remember that onchip sata type had a setting that could be changed to AHCI so I tried changing this and then found that it allowed me to cahnge onchip sata port 4/5 type to [as SATA type] see screenshot 2. However when I tried to boot I got the Disk error in screenshot 3.

After a bit of trial and error I found that each time I changed one of these two settings it altered my boot sequence to USB data bar first. Once I had sussed this I tried again.

This time it got as far as starting the windows 7 start up logo but then crashed with a blue screen (too fast to read any of the screen)

So I went back and changed just the second setting back screenshot 4 (and reset the boot drive order) but I got the same flashed blue screen each time I did this. As windows tried to start it did offer to "repair the boot up" however I am always cautious about letting windows do anything like this, and since I was fairly certain none of the boot up files were damaged I hit restart normally but got the same blue screen flash.

Changed everything back to my original settings and it booted up just fine which suggests to me I was probably right not to let windows repair itself.

I bought the motherboard new about 18months - 2years ago but that may be no indication of how old it really is, since I got it to replace to replace one which had failed and had to hunt around for one that was the right specs for my processor and memory as I couldnt afford to upgrade those at the time

Is it likely that updating the bios using the gigabyte @Bios windows tool, would likely improve it - for me updating bios is a last resort as I always worry about being left with a dead motherboard. At least this tool connects to the their servers and only offers me one uption (screenshot 5)

 

[alphanumeric]

You can't just switch from IDE to AHCI in the BIOS, you also have to do a regedit in Windows.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-windows-7-vista.html