My disk D, with all of my pictures, music, documents has basically ceased to work a couple of days ago.

It all started out with my system just randomly shutting down on me sometime on Sunday. I could not turn the pc on for a while, but after some trials I managed to get it up and running again. However, when I turned it on, my disk D was missing in the My Computer window. I tried all sorts of things to find out whether it was an operating system error or something with my hardware, though I still really have no clue. After the attempts with checking the op system, disk D still didn't show up. It wasn't until today I changed the wires connecting my drive to the motherboard that it actually popped up in the My Computer window. I can't open it though! Upon clicking on it, it reads:

"D:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and UNREADABLE."

What's going on? Is there any way to get my disk to work again, without formatting it and getting rid of all my files? Maybe it's simpler than that?

Your help would be greatly appreciated, HOPE you can help me out!HI & welcome to the CH forums.

Need some info about your setup such as the operating system, is your Local Disk D: a partition or a SEPARATE hard drive, if a separate drive is it slaved  or is it on ide2 or are you using sata drive(s)

Please post your setup info.

ThanksI'm on windows section and I shouldn't present you Linux solutions... But, if you have 2 harddisks on your computer, and you can make a new ext2/3 or fat32 partition on the harddisk that has no problems...
Post more data about your computer. It sounds to me like a DAMAGED partition or (more dangerous) a damaged harddisk.

If it is a damaged partition I could recommend you Knoppix or SystemRescueCd (both are Linux Live cds).