D: drive not visible in explorer as well as Disk Management

^Exactly my thoughts. But my choice will be the WinPE disk created by AOMEI Partition Assistant.(It has Partition Recovery too, but I think none has tried it so far.) Free Download Partition Magic Software & Partition Manager Freeware for Hard Disk Partition Management - AOMEI Partition Assistant Home edition Freeware.

If the third party partition tools do not help in identifying the problem, then I would suggest first Data Recovery using PhotoRec.

If data Recovery is accomplished with PhotoRec, then the OP can proceed with rewriting the partition table with Test Disk.

I would have to say that when I installed win 7, the unallocated space was 12 MB not GB. Also I used a full NTFS format option. When my bro formatted it to FAT 32, the unallocated space remained the same. I tried mini partition tool wizard pro, the D: drive is still missing.

Make the bootable cd, drop it in , boot up the pc and see what shows up.

Partition Wizard Bootable CD allows user to manage partition directly with partition manager bootable CD.

Okay...will give it a try.

should I try "Rebuild MBR" or am I in dangerous territory.

in windows search disk management... u should find ur D drive. right click, change path/drive directory. it should work. my friend's laptop got this thing too...

u'r D drive's got the same directory with the new directory for win 7 thus, it's kind of conflict. change u'r D directory should work