I'm trying to figure out how a user has got himself in this predicament. Last month he had Windows 7 go bad on his PC, so we reinstalled windows, drivers, and apps. He reinstalled Desktop 10.2.2 from media I had downloaded, don't know which patches he applied. There was a partial backup of some of his data and settings, so some of the maps and data he had on C: were lost. But many of his projects and much of his GIS data were on an external USB drive, so I thought at least he wouldn't have trouble with that source. However, some of those mxd's don't completely load. Looking at the data sets that will not draw in the Catalog window, we see that they are listed, but have a blue ? in front of them, not the yellow !. All the ones like this that I saw are shapefiles. They don't draw in ArcMap or preview in catalog. What does the blue question mark mean?
I suggested that he point Windows Explorer at the top folder of his GIS data on the USB drive and try a reset of owner to be his new login to everything in the tree, even though his new log in appears to be the same as his old log in.