Lost Access to Ext. HDD

I was trying to lock off my external hard disk to everyone aside from my administrator account on my own PC. It seems that in the process I ended up locking it off completely.

It now shows up simply as Local Disk - Unlabeled Volume 7, without displaying any information about it, and when I check its properties it shows no information about it,and the Security tab is missing. I tried to take ownership of it using takeown from cmd, with administrative privileges enabled and UAC disabled. That gave me an access denied message.

Does anyone know how I could access it, or reset the permissions?

I'm using Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Try assigning a letter to the external drive. Click on Start orb, type diskmgmt.msc, in the window that opens right click on that drive, click Add, click the letter you want to use, then click OK.

If you run into permissions problems after this, try using the takeownership shortcut.

Take Ownership Shortcut

Hi Bill2, thanks for the advice! It didn't work for me though.

In Disk Management it already showed up with a drive letter (J). I then changed the drive letter, after which it told me that I would need to format that particular drive before I could use it. After this, I connected it to my Mac, from which I can see that all my files are still intact. I would just back up the data and format the drive, but I don't have enough space to accomplish this without losing some stuff.

I couldn't get the Take Ownership Shortcut working directly, but I followed the links that explained what it was doing, and ultimately I think it came down to using "takeown /f drive" through an elevated command prompt. That failed as well.

Any other suggestions?

Try taking ownership manually.

Windows 7 Access Denied: Permission & Ownership

Also try booting into safe mode and then accessing the external.

Going into Safe Mode worked! Thank you SO much for your help Bill2!