I have a dell laptop, lattitude. It has been solid as a rock for over 6 months when it was new. I had a strange event happen that may or may not be related to Windows 7.It had been idle for several hours, and I came back to it and it became unstable, so i went to reboot it and had that ugly message can't find the hard drive!!!I quickly did the power off thing and rebooted fine.Now perhaps it is a hardware issue, but perhaps not. Windows 7 is suppose to power down the hard drive when not in use, then power it back up when needed.So I am wondering if anyone else has seen hard drive wake up issues with Windows 7?Thanks,d- http://jahzwolf.com

I doubt it had anything to with some of the sleep and wake up problems people had with this build of the beta. I'm afraid it sounds more like 'just' a regular HD failure which of course isn't related to the version of any OS you were using at the moment. ;-x

It sounds as if you have a hardware issue. If the BIOS reported that it cant find a hard drive, then you have eliminated any OS involvement.

It depends on where the message came from. If it was from the BIOS, then there's most likely an issue with the hard drive.If it came from the Windows boot sequence, iit's most likely that Windows couln't determine (from the MBR) where your boot drive or boot sector was.Finally, I just had a similar issue on my system because I had a USB drive plugged in when I booted. Removing the USB drive allowed me to boot without issues. - John

Welllll I don't know if this is on the same problem or not BUT!! Mine would not hibernate right after I installed then I checked my settings, after that it was fine until the last 2 days my monitor goes to sleep when it suppose to but the computer is still on and it does not sleep again. I checked my settings and they are fine but it stayed awake all night again. could it be picking up a signal from my home network or something along those lines?? I can make it go to sleep and awhile later it is awake? Maybe it is the Ghost of COMPUTER PAST"?Love Windows7 so I'm not picking like some I have seen on these blogs. I may not be able to afford to put it on all 10 computers I have like I did Vista but I do like it.chamblisstom@bellsouth.net

It sounds to me to be hardware related.I did have one system, that would give the "Hard drive not found "error when it could not find the OS. If you are an advanced user, then I would suggest trying the TestDisk utility.Youwill have to download it. I can't remember where I found it though. :( I have used that little program to recover from all sorts of Hard Drive issues. Including when I messed up and deleted all my partitions when I set up Win 7.TestDisk is handy and very helpful, but be careful, it can also be your worst nightmare if you make a mistake too.Found the Site http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk