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Question

Denied access to external HD even after Taking Ownership

May 17, 2016 9:17PM PDT

Hi all,

I'm running Windows 10 and I have a 1TB Seagate Slim external HD formatted as NTFS. Since recently I have been unable to access the drive. Note: I am using an Admin account. I even tried on the built-in Admin account.

First attempt: You do not have permission
Second attempt: I/O error

Then I was searching around and read that my problem could be a permissions thing too, so:
I right click the drive
> Properties
> Security Tab
> (everything is empty because "You must have Read permissions to view the properties of this object"
> Advanced
> All tabs (Permissions/Auditing/Effective Access) are empty because of the "You must have Read permissions" error
> "Owner: Unable to display current owner"
> "Click Continue to attempt the operation with administrative permissions"/"Change" lead to the same error
> "You do not have permission to view or edit this object's permission settings" for both tabs 

I also have "Take Ownership" as a line in my context menu which still does not give me permission. Exactly the same errors.

Help anyone?

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: errors on external harddisk
May 18, 2016 12:04AM PDT

If formatting (takes a long time if you don't do a quick format, but a full format) gives an error also, it's time for a new external HD. If it succeeds there's a good chance that you can copy new files to them and read them also.
But there's every reason to make an extra copy of everything you put on it, because it might become unreliable again.

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Answer
REPLY
May 18, 2016 4:50AM PDT

Hi @Sxw_W!

I'm sorry to hear about your troubles, mate, I know how unpleasant such thing could be. At this point you can try to access the information on the HDD with Linux Live CD. What you have to do is just download/burn the ISO image to a CD or USB and change the boot order to the media you burned the Linux on. Once it loads, you could try and mount the drive (or if Linux can read it, it will mount by itself) and see if you can transfer the files from the external.

If it doesn't help, then it will best to contact some data recovery company in order to get your data back from the external. Here's a link with some companies that are partners with WD in case you want to take a look:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=3xxeDX

Hope this helps and best of luck! Happy