Question for computer experts

I have my hard drive partitioned into 3 drives c, d, and e. For some unknown reason, it is not recognizing d and e drives, only c. I have no idea why, it just started this a couple of hours ago. Any help is greatly appreciated.

So "c" your way out of it before "d" and "e" "f" you up!

Sorry...pot makes me stupid.

It will see if the logical partitions are still there. Did you just partition them, or have they been this way for a while? If this is recent, and there is no irreplaceable data on any of those drives, you may want to redefine the partions and reload -- though this is a pain in the ass, to be sure.

Are you running differnet O/S on the partions, or are you partioning them for "housekeeping" reasons?

I ran fdisk and it is showing the partitions still there. The strange thing that I notice is it lists the file system for the primary partition as fat 32, but doesn't list a file system at all for the extended partition, just the size.

It should just be listed as an extended partition.
The logical drives would contain filesystems.

or did u take an existing hard drive that only had a C partition and divided down into 3?

You don't mention what OS you are using. But if it's Windows based I suggest you go into Disk Management and first make sure that those letters (d&e) don't conflict with a CD Rom drive for example. Also it's possible the partitions are there but need to be formatted to be seen by the OS. You see these partitions in Disk Management

In the first case (assuming these new partitions are blank) I suggest you leave the CD Rom's drive letter as is and change the drive letters of these new partitions. If you change the CD Rom drive letter; you'll run into problems with software that expects the CD Rom to be at the old letter.

I have been running this old machine for a long time with the partitions. the cd rom used to be f, but after d and e dissappeared, the cd rom changed to d:

they need to be Formatted with the appropriate utility to the format desired. (May be a different O/S in some cases.)

If the drives were previously formatted, it would seem they may have been corrupted, possibly by a virus or the partition table itself might have been corrupted.

Do you have a disk recovery tool like Norton Disk Doctor ?