NEED HDD HELP ASAP

Maybe a loose SATA cable or power cable. Check your connections.

The HDD is detected after a restart. So it can't be a connection issue with the Sata or power cords.

I'd unplug and replug them anyway - SATA connectors are notorious for working themselves loose and they could well be at a point where the connection is intermittent. It won't cost anything to try.

Run the hard drive in another computer. If possible also get a different SATA and run in your computer.

Basically you need to do a little troubleshooting. I'd be very surprised if it was the hard drive.

You need to prove it's not problems with:
1) motherboard
2) hard drive
3) power or data connections
4) Windows

This following probably won't solve the issue but it won't hurt. I've done it on many computers that have mysterious hard drive issues.

1) Open up the Device Manager
2) Right-click and Remove all SATA controllers (just remove them all)
3) Reboot and WAIT for controllers (and then drives) to be reinstalled

*There's a common glitch that affects XP/Vista and Windows 7 where the Read and/or Write performance oddly drops very low for a hard drive. Doing the above has fixed the problem every single time.

Well, I looked up in Event Viewer.
The first Warning was:
"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR1 during a paging operation."

The Error:
"The device 'WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B0 ATA Device' (IDE\DiskWDC_WD1001FALS-00J7B0___________________05.00K05\5&5c6cfd6&0&1.0.0) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal."

The warning came 1 minute before the error.

I just looked up Event ID 51 on Microsoft's website it states

"In this case, no harmful affects are experienced. For example, event ID 51 is logged when blank media such as CDR, CDRW, DVDR, and so on, is inserted into a writable drive while a USB device is plugged in. The system logs the event even though the disc is writable, and the USB device is still usable. In these particular cases, you can safely ignore the log entries, and no additional action is required."

I have a USB flash drive plugged in, but not a blank disk, just my DVD of WIC.

That was for the warning.

There Error was a Event ID 12

After reading some things, maybe it isn't a problem with my HDD and hopefully MB, because my other HDD has never done this. It is a 3 year old WD 320GB AAKS HDD.

Any other ideas?

uh, yes it can. It certainly can be something that simple, a loose cable or bad connection will give you exactly the problem you have, and it is not uncommon at all. I have had the same issues which were finally fixed by replacing a bad SATA cable. That problem drove me nuts for months (started one day out of the blue on a 6 month old build) before I finally just broke down and replaced the stinking cable, problem solved.

You're absolutely right. I switched the SATA cable to my boot drive and it didn't load OS. My PC said load boot drive and restart. I got rid of the cable and used a new one and it works great. SMART says all HDDs are fine. Thanks again.

You are welcome. Glad that's all it was, and the problem is resolved.