Hello One of my friends' hard drives is not showing up in the explorer and can't access it in any way. I looked at it and i have no idea where the thing went, it's the D drive. Fat32, 99% sure of that. It's not a new drive, it has data on it, it's a western digital 80 gig. It shows the drive in the device manager, i looked at manage if i could give the drive a letter but nope can't. I looked at the IDE settings and they are all on DMA if available. And auto detection. After uninstalling it and rebooting, windows found the drive and installs it, still the same problem. HELP!

Sounds like it's a secondary drive. Have you checked the partitons on the drive with the command FDISK from an a: prompt? Be careful with FDISK as it can erase your drive if you are not careful.

Visit the manufacturers website. You should find diagnostic tool to download and test the drive. Download the tool. run the exe with a formatted floppy in the drive. It will create a bootdisk. Boot up using the floppy and follow the prompts to test the drive. Be careful not to do any low level format test as that will erase the drive contents.