I recently made the colossal mistake of trying to make my computer sleep. Horrible decision, I know. When I did it would no longer boot up. It said please select proper boot drive or insert boot media into disk. I reset my bios to get it to work, blah blah blah, no dice. So I finally tried to get it working by putting in my windows 7 disk and setting my CD drive as the primary boot drive. I figured out what the problem was. When I set my computer to sleep IT CHANGED THE F ING DRIVE NAME OF MY C:\ DRIVE TO H:\ AND MADE 100MB SYSTEM RESERVED SPACE TO MY C:\ DRIVE. I'm RIDICULOUSLY happy right now. I'm singing in the rain and dancing in the streets etc. Has this happened to anyone else before and does anyone know how to fix this before I just re-install windows?

It actually sounds more like your CMOS battery is dead or dying, forcing the BIOS to rescan the hardware each time the computer powers up and Windows is resetting the drive assignments because it's seeing the drive as "newly installed".

Found the answer. HOOOOOOOOO BOY am I glad for this problem. It's a special problem in every sense of the word. What had happened was that when I made my computer sleep, it changed the order of my hard drives. I have 2 hard drives installed, my original 500 GB Western Digital and a slave 1.5 TB Western Digital. It changed the order of my hard disks in the BIOS. This meant that when I was checking my boot device priority, it had my slave drive selected as my hard disk, and since I wasn't paying attention to the full disk name, I just saw the hard disk out of the three options (floppy disk, the hard disk designator, and the cd drive designator) in my boot device priority screen and assumed that it was correct. TO FIX PROBLEM: What I did was to change the order of my hard disks in the boot tab in my bios. To do this run setup and enter your bios. Press the right arrow key to get to the boot tab and then press the down arrow key to get to the hard disk drives menu. Press enter and then change the order of your hard disks if you have more than one hard disk. This will not affect you if you do not have more than one hard disk. Make sure that your boot device priority is correct (normal is floppy, hard disk, cd drive). and then press F10 to save and exit.

Bob, Thanks for your reply. I appreciate you trying to help. To anyone else: I would really love to know exactly what it was that caused this to happen. I have never heard of anything like this happening before and am really curious to know exactly what could have possibly caused this.

I've started this thread as a solution for a problem that I encountered when I told my computer to sleep. I have to hard drives both made by Western Digital. I don't know if that is what caused the error (I have no idea why this happened FYI), but it is the cause of why I didn't recognize the problem sooner. What happened is that when I told my computer to sleep it changed the boot order of my hard drives, so that when I went to check the boot priority of the hard drives, I just saw the hard drive designator and figured it was the correct one. If this problem happens to you, make sure that in the hard disk drives menu of the boot tab of your bios, the disk that has windows on it is the first disk that gets booted. This problem was causing my computer to look in the wrong hard disk for my OS. Here is the original thread that I started when looking for the answer: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/4a6fd961-7aad-40f7-b43c-cd8b7173b147

I'm glad you found a solution. You're right though, this is not normal behavior. You say that one drive is Master and the other Slave; are these drives PATA (IDE) or SATA? If they're SATA then it's not a Master/Slave relationship at all because SATA only allows one device per channel. Could you possibly have your storage drive on SATA1 and your boot drive on SATA2? A default boot sequence in BIOS would be Floppy->PATA Hard Drive->SATA1->SATA2->SATAx...->CDROM/DVD Drive->USB device->Network device. As you noted, this can be changed by the user. Something caused your BIOS to reset to default; it could have been a simple power surge, but my money's still on a bad CMOS battery.

Oh, that's interesting. Thank you for clarifying about the master/slave for SATA drives. I do have SATA drives. The way that I have my drives plugged in is my optical is on SATA1, my boot drive is on SATA2, and the storage drive is on SATA3. I'm hesitant to call it a bad CMOS battery because, to me at least, the primary sign of a bad CMOS battery would be my system clock resetting every time that I shut my computer off. Do you think that I could still have a bad CMOS battery? Thanks again for your help, Bob.

If you're relying on the time that's displayed in Windows to determine this then don't. When you boot your computer, if there's an active Internet connection, Windows, by default, will go to Microsoft's timeserver and reset your system clock to whatever's appropriate for the time zone you have selected. The battery is cheap, so it's easy to test this and you're only out a couple of bucks if that isn't it. It's usually a 3v button-type battery just like in a watch; you can pick one up pretty much anywhere - a computer shop, Best Buy, Walmart's jewelry department... Here's the Wikipedia article on them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonvolatile_BIOS_memory

I was talking about the real-time clock that is displayed in BIOS. Thank you for the heads up though, I probably wouldn't have even considered it. You're right, it is such a cheap part to replace that if there's a suspicion of it being bad, just to go replace it. Thanks again for all of your help