M1710 hard drive detection failure

First off, my apologies if this has been addressed in a prior thread, I searched for a bit and found nothing like this.

I have an M1710, 7900gs 256mb video card, 3 gigs of ram, used mostly for web surfing and World of Warcraft. Last week I installed a 60gig solid state hard drive and loaded a fresh install of Windows 7. After loading drivers etc. it runs like a beast, better than new. However, about 3/4 of the time on cold start-up, it fails to detect the hard drive. I can usually get around this by going into the setup, changing something, saving, going back into setup, selecting the factory reset option, on the next startup it finds the hard drive and boots no problem. A couple of times I have had to repeat the process before it boots, and once it gets to starting Windows I have no issues whatsoever.

I should note that this happened occasionally with the factory hard drive, but much more so now with the solid state (I thought that the factory drive was nearing its end, hence my purchase of the SSD) My battery is also dead, doesn't take a charge, but I always run the laptop off of an outlet so that's been one purchase I have been putting off. Has anyone seen this before and/or have any ideas on how to fix this permanently?

Thank you in advance.

 

Is it detected in the BIOS but not by the OS or is it not even detected in the BIOS? If the latter, I suspect an incompatibility with the model that you bought. You may want to check for updated 1730 BIOS and/or solid state drive firmwares.