Hard drive keeps disappearing from File Explorer

My computer has a SSD and two hard drives. One of the hard drives I rarely log on to. When I did log on to it, the Windows update was very large, so there wasn't room to do it, or there was another problem, but the update was removed before I could access the drive again. Now, there are times it isn't present in Disk Management and times when it is. The same holds true for File Explorer, though sometimes I can access my second partition in File Explorer but not the primary OS partition. Eventually I want to format the OS partition and turn the hdd into one partition for storage, but I don't want to do that before I can guaranty I'll have access to it. I have no problem logging on to that hdd. Any suggestions on how to deal with this disappearing trick?

 

Is this the one that goes 'walkabout'? Neil.

 

Neil, I guess you are very familiar with walkabouts. Maybe that is what is happening. Every time I log on to the HDD it becomes visible on my other drives but soon starts to disappear. I'd just format that partition, but I'm afraid then I'd have no way to access that drive. Any ideas what might work? Yes, it is the 160gb HDD.

 

I would suspect corruption of the SATA adapter software. Did you have to load drivers for the adapter? I would uninstall the HDD - Restart the comp and see if Windows loads the drivers again. Neil.

 

I don't remember loading DLLs, but I will take your advice and uninstall the HDD when I get back from work. I'll keep you posted.

 

Uninstalling the drivers and then restarting the computer didn't seem to fix the problem. The drivers are:
System32\DRIVERS\disk.sys
System32\DRIVERS\EhStorClass.sys
System32\DRIVERS\partmgr.sys

Here is what the results look like right not, though my 160 storage may disappear in a short while.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yv33n89c1eqz4k7/Disappearing 160 Win 8 Pro.docx?dl=0

 

Both partitions are showing up now on my SSD. I can't tell when it will be here and when it won't. Any other ideas on how to nail it down?

 

Now both partitions are gone. Easy come easy go.

 

For clarification, when I was using my SSD, I could see both partitions of my HDD in the device manager and disk manager. I started running WD diagnostics on the peek-a-boo HDD, but it disappeared during the test. This is strange, and not something I've encountered before. Usually when I switch drives it appears for a while, but eventually disappears again.