My Biostar G31-M7 seems to have SATA controller issues

Greetings,

I custom built a computer for my father during the holidays last year and everything has been running fairly smoothly since then. But now he's been getting strange freeze-ups.

My first reflex was to check the HDD, but seeing as how I got him a better one this summer, I was pretty confident it wasn't a HDD issue. And HD monitor seems to agree... although the 53% health rating is a little worrying considering it's pretty friggin' new.

Ahem...

So, at one point I noticed that it wouldn't recognize the optical drive upon booting for reasons beyond my understanding.

So, I powered the whole thing down and checked the SATA cables in case anything was loose. Unplugging and replugging the cables worked like a charm, but then his girlfriend tells me she did the same thing a month or two ago...

Hummm....

So, as I was working on his computer, the mysterious freeze up occurred. Indeed, no blue screens or error messages, just the computer locking up as if the CPU was overloaded. Considering this thing runs next to nothing besides Firefox, that'd be quite a stretch,

So, I tried rebooting, but to no avail as the computer failed to recognize ANY drive, be it optical or HDD.

A little panicked, I powered the computer down and unplugged/replugged the SATA cables.

And voila, everything works again...

Until it did the same thing this morning...

Same solution, but it is a little worrisome...

Anyone know what might be going wrong? Am I right in assuming it's a SATA controller issue?

All drivers and BIOS are up to date.
I'm running Win XP SP3.
The mobo is a 1 year old Biostar G31-M7 TE running an Intel LGA775 E5200 2515MHZ with a 1 GB stick of DDR2-667 RAM.
I have a LG DVRW drive and a Seagate 500GB HDD, both Sata II.

I made sure I had the latest driver updates with the mobo.

Thanks