Windows 7 Cannot Access External Harddrive

[Jormungandr]

Hi,

I bought an enclosure for my old broken desktop's hard drive, connected it to my laptop, but whenever I try to go into it it just says "Access Denied"

I have tried changing the drive's letter, I've looked at permissions and everything is ticked, and I've gone into advanced and changed ownership, yet it still says access denied.

I tried going into safe mode and I can access it, and I copied a random file over to my C drive and it works. So I'm assuming its not a hardware problem, it just refuses to give me access on my regular (administrator) account.

I've tried searching around and most solutions seem to be the things I have already tried. Perhaps there are some settings I need to fiddle around with in safe mode, but I'm not too experienced so don't want to play around too much. So any advice on what to try would be great, it'd be a real hassle to have to go into safe mode and copy/paste everytime I wanted to access a file. I'm using windows 7 home premium or whatever silly name it has.

 

[JMH]

Hi,

I bought an enclosure for my old broken desktop's hard drive, connected it to my laptop, but whenever I try to go into it it just says "Access Denied"

I have tried changing the drive's letter, I've looked at permissions and everything is ticked, and I've gone into advanced and changed ownership, yet it still says access denied.

I tried going into safe mode and I can access it, and I copied a random file over to my C drive and it works. So I'm assuming its not a hardware problem, it just refuses to give me access on my regular (administrator) account.

I've tried searching around and most solutions seem to be the things I have already tried. Perhaps there are some settings I need to fiddle around with in safe mode, but I'm not too experienced so don't want to play around too much. So any advice on what to try would be great, it'd be a real hassle to have to go into safe mode and copy/paste everytime I wanted to access a file. I'm using windows 7 home premium or whatever silly name it has.

Hi Jormungandr and welcome.

Given that you can access the drive in safe mode it is obviously a permission/ownership problem. You need to take ownership of the entire drive. Go here to find out how Take Ownership Shortcut - Windows 7 Forums.

Let us know if you need any assistance.


JMH

 

[Jormungandr]

Hey, thank you, I looked at the settings and SYSTEM and Administrators were the only two on the list, with full permissions, I assumed that would include my account but I typed the name in and added full control, it said there was an error and access was denied, but despite that I can access the hard drive and everything in it.

So thank you again\/

 

[Super Sarge]

Sometimes adding Everyone with full permissions will also do the trick