Second internal hard drive suddenly missing except from BIOS

Hello All

I have a Dell Optiplex 380 purchased in 2011
OS = Windows 7 Prof 32 bit

The PC has 2 internal drives, 'C' = OS and program files/data and 'D' = all my data, music, photos, etc

The last few days the PC was starting to seem slow. Monday morning while I was working applications such as Word, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, Outlook started showing 'not responding' before continuing with what I was doing. I figured something was wrong and decided to do a backup.

I plugged my external drive into a USB port, went to drag and drop from 'D' but 'D' was no longer showing in Windows Explorer. Checked Device Manager and Disk Management and no 'D' drive.

Check BIOS and there it was. I have attached a couple of photos (taken from my iPhone) to show. EDIT** seems that I can't upload the photos from my iPad.

My husband has a FixMeStick (USB virus software 'tool' that scans the computer before Windows is loaded) and said I should try it. It scanned the 'C' drive and then it scanned the 'D' drive. So it found the missing 'D' drive.

Does anyone have any idea what could have happened, what I might do to get my drive back and if worst comes to worst, any suggestions on how to recover the last 11 days of data. I have a recent backup from July 6 but would like the data.

Thanks for any help.

Barb

We didn't get photos. What does the stick boot to is Windows, MS-DOS? You could download a free partitioning bootable software and see if that sees it and what it makes of it

Go to www.xubuntu.com and create a 32-bit Xubuntu Linux DVD. Then boot from it. You can run Linux entirely from the DVD, without affecting your hard drives at all.

Once you have booted into Linux, see if you can see your 2nd hard drive from within Linux. If so, then the issue is likely (but not definitely) with Windows rather than with the hard drive. Also, you can copy your files from the 2nd hard drive to your external hard drive while in Linux.