Perhaps your files have become encrypted.
I believe this is a standard facility with NTFS files.
We have been told so little about the problem,
just continual re-iteration that files cannot be read,
but never a definition of what way they cannot be read.
Questions :-
Can you select one of these “unreadable” files and copy it to another folder ?
Can you perform a binary (not text) comparison of that copy with its original ?
Do they match ?
Alan
Have you checked the Permissions for your files or is it not possible to do that?
Take Ownership of a File or Folder | Microsoft Learn for Windows XP
You do not state the OS, XP, Vista or Windows 7 that you are using.
I notice you have quite an unusual setup for your hard disks and wonder if this might have confused the system cleaner.
Your boot disk (drive 0) holds your D (the boot partition), F and H partitions and disk 1 holds your C (system) and E drives.
Usually drive 0 holds the boot and system partitions. The fact you can still boot from, but not read any data on your D drive is very puzzling.
Have you already tried doing a ‘chkdsk’ to see if these partitions contain errors?
What about if you use a tool that can read disk sectors directly, can you tell if your data is there or has been corrupted?
WOW! You’re an Engineer? I have never seen HDD’s partitioned like that! Not to mention that partitioning actually slows down data transfer in the farthest partitions. Anyway, I assume you have the original OS disk? Are you running Windows XP? If so, boot from that OS disk and enter Windows setup. When it asks if you want to setup Windows say yes. The SECOND time it asks if you want to set up Windows or do a repair—select repair. That will lead you to the recovery console. For every partition you have (starting with you “system” partition, type CHKDSK /R for Windows to repair whatever problems it finds. This process takes some time, especially with 5 partitions, but it may find and fix your problem. Personally, I don’t think it will but it’s worth a try. While in whatever OS you are using you can also open a command prompt (with full administrator rights) and run SFC /SCANNOW which find system files that are not in their original form and repairs them. If you are in Vista or 7, hit the “start” button and in the search box type CMD. Now, at the very top you will see “cmd”. Right-click and select “run as administrator”. Then type in sfc /scannow and hit enter. You may need you Windows disk if it asks for it. Otherwise, “wiping” entire partitions with data on them is asking for trouble. One last thing you can try. Download ubcd4Windows v4 from a known computer that works. Read the directions and then burn the program to a CD. Then boot from that CD on your own System. Go into the file tools after the program finally gets loaded and it may be able to read your files. Good luck!