Adjusted startup: HP Factory Image drive disappears after each restart

Two problems, related in timing.

On July 1st, I made some adjustments to my startup config and such, and ever since then I've been having problems where my IE and Windows Media Player freeze for a few seconds when loading (though without interrupting data)


But most important of which is that since that time, my HP Factory Image D:\ drive has disappeared. It never served me any purpose, but it always just sat there in my Hard Disk lists on my Computer screen, and is conspicuous in its absence.


I checked my Disk Management and found that the 12 GB where the "D" drive was had become "Unallocated". Before I did something stupid, I checked to Rescan Drives, and it re-found the Factory Image! From then on, the FACTORY_IMAGE (D shows up in my Computer.


But after a few days I found that it was no longer showing on my Computer window, and realized that after restarting or shutting down my comp, it would always disappear, only to re-appear when I rescan my disks.



What's the problem? What service do I need to restore/fix to stop this from happening?




Somewhat related question: Would getting a whole new motherboard and CPU but retaining the old harddrive end these problems mentioned above or is it something to do solely with my faulty configurations?

before you start spending money or mess your machine up any more--go into MSCONFIG and select the normal startup button then restart to see if problem(s) are gone

But I had already tried restarting by re-enabling all the things I had disabled; it even conveniently showed me which date I had disabled each item, and so I did that