access denied

paul60_2

can anyone help PLEASE, My external hardrive will not let me in, when I try to open the drive it shows the message access denied. As a digital artist all my recent work is not accessable, getting desperate now HELP

[Deleted User]

Morning, Paul60,

You an early bird as well,

sorry can't help you with your problem, know nothing about ex hard drives, tho' I googled ' hard drive access denied ' and got pages of sites, so you could maybe try that while waiting for an expert.

Hope you get sorted.

paul60_2

Many thanks Frugal,
Will have a go at what you suggested. Yes an earkybird up a 2 this morning that is the best time for me to be creative.

shutton54321

I would try disconnecting it and re-connecting if you still have the same problem, as a program or something may be in use....just a thought

SonOfPearl

Try connecting the external hard drive to a different USB port on your computer and see if you can access the drive then. If you can, then the original USB port is broken.

If you still can't access it, try connecting the external hard drive to another computer (do you have a laptop perhaps?) instead and see if that works.

If not, then the secret is to have backed up the information somewhere else! Sorry!

Storman_2

Firstly what operating system are you using ?

Assuming it's XP I think you just need to take "ownership" of the files, which for some reason has been lost.

Read the info on these two links - that will save me typing it in here.

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_security_tab.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421

:cool:

odowdchr

Assuming the disk shows up in Explorer, you can open a command prompt and try and run chkdsk X:
If it can't get access to the drive, it will offer to scgedule to run at the next reboot before windows has loaded. This can sometimes fix errors with external USB drives.

paul60_2

many thanks to you all, Itried all of your suggestions and nothing worked, I now assume the drive is knackered. A hard lesson learnt backup and backup again.

albertross_2

take the drive out of the enclosure, and stick it in a PC as a slave, then try chkdsk on it.

DVD's are a better backup medium, one virus could take out the lot on a hard disk.

paul60_2

Many thanks to all of you, I will take the advice offered. I have managed to recover some of my work with a recovery programe I had called rescue pro, so all is not lost but still frustrating losing any work.