My husband replaced a hard drive in one of our slower computers. The MB is a MSI, 1.6 gig AMD processor with 1 gig RAM, OS is Win XP/SP2. It literally took three hours to get Win XP to load as I could not get the hard drive to format, but I was determined and finally succeeded. I had to resort to putting Win 98 on the drive and then doing an upgrade to XP. The updates are complete and up to date, and when we shut down last night, everything was working fine and normal. When he booted up this morning, he received the error message the hard drive could not be found. I checked the Bios and the hard drive was gone! I reset it to Auto, the hard drive was found, rebooted and is now running fine. I've checked all the settings in the Bios and they seem to be normal, so once again, I'm turning to my computer gurus for suggestions. You can reboot as many times as you like and it keeps its settings. It's only when you shut the computer down and leave it off for quite a while that it loses its settings in the Bios.  

This computer was working fine. The only reason we replaced the hard drive is this computer is being moved upstairs as a secondary computer. He is building me a new one for Christmas (yea) and we no longer needed a 200 gig hard drive in a spare computer. I was thinking a cable problem, but just needed your input.

Merry Christmas - and thanks for your help!

Sue

Bad cable is possible. Another possibility-how old is this hard drive?
The fact it was so hard to format and that it only becomes "lost" when it has time to cool down also points to a possibly failing drive.
Of course, there is also a chance that a new drive could be bad right out of the box.

He changed the cable today when we returned from church and it has been running like a charm ever since. The opening Bios screen now jumps into play like normal where before it sat on that screen for almost 30 seconds. I guess tomorrow morning will tell the tale if the new cable worked. Thanks for the input and I'll let you know how Monday a.m. goes with it reboots from no overnight use.

Thanks!

Sue

Hi,
Sounds like the CMOS battery is failing.
It re-charges while the computer is switched on and a failing battery loses its charge when the computer is switched off - especially for a few days/hours and especially is the room is cold. Once run down the CMOS setting revert to default and the information you have entered since (hard drive details for instance) are lost.
Worth investing in a new one.