I had a SATA drive cable connection go bad and now the drive letter for the Vista boot drive changed and it no longer boots up. It just restarts all the time during the bootup process. I've tried the Vista repair option on the install CD to no avail. Is there any hope to fix this problem?

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Bruce, At a guess you have a desktop PC and within this PC is a card reader, probably holding 4/5 cards. If you attempt to insert a new hard drive it wont automatically be called the C drive. If what I describe is correct, then unplug the card reader from the motherboard, load windows onto your hard drive, and then connect the card reader again.

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Your BOX/Machine doesn't know C from buffaloooo. It's only information comes from 
what YOU enter into the BIOS as the Primary boot device, Secondary, and so on. There 
may very well be a couple of things you need to set there. Once the BOX/Machine access 
"THE Drive" you have selected then it searches for booting instructions. In the case 
of Vista that is the BCD. It looks for and finds basically three files, BCD, ntldr, 
& NTdetect. Not nesc. in that order. After that it looks for your registry and then 
loads Explorer.exe. That is an abbreviated version. You mentioned that "it" keeps 
restarting. Does the machine go clear back as if it was reset with the reset button. 
This being the POST. By this I mean re-searching through the floppy/Cd's/ whatever 
you have connected. OR does Vista just go back to  the beginning of it's boot sequence. 
How far does it get before it restarts. Try this 2-5 seconds after you hit the start 
button (I mean really short) hit the reset button and see if it boots. That could 
be a sign of a bad motherboard or bad/weak power supply. I am curious if you plugged 
the 'NEW' cable into the exact same socket on the motherboard. You may have a damaged 
socket. these are fragile and get broken quite frequently. As far as card readers 
go, the drive assignment is done by Vista after it is well on its way through boot 
up and has little to do with the boot seq. Your boot drive could in theory be called 
Z:\ and still boot just fine. If you are confident (I am not) that your efforts repairing 
the BCD are complete and correct, then you may need to go to the next step and do 
a system repair which restores your system files. A previous bad cable could have 
left some corrupted system files. You have some work ahead of you.

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