Denied external drive permission after factory reset

Lyrical MC · 02 Jan 2012

Hey, apologies for the delayed reply.

Tried the command you posted and got the following message:

The drive was the same as before (G)

Total · 02 Jan 2012

What happens when you right click on command prompt , then select run as admin ?

then try the commands ..

Lyrical MC · 02 Jan 2012

Total said:

What happens when you right click on command prompt , then select run as admin ?

then try the commands ..

Is that wise? It comes up as running it with system32 as opposed to my own user:

Pretty sure system32 is something I don't want to be messing around with if I don't know what im doing.

Lyrical MC · 09 Jan 2012

Bump

alphanumeric · 09 Jan 2012

C:\Windows\system32 is where cmd.exe is located. Command Prompt opens to that location because that is where it is run from. You can switch directories if you want to. For example if you type in cd\ it will change to C:\. cd is change directory. Typing in cd/? will get you a list of options for the cd command. You can do that with any command. if you want to go to C:\Users\Chris type in cd\ and then cd C:\Users\Chris

Slammer · 13 Jan 2012

Sorry it's taken me so long to respond to this. Yes, you should run it as an admin. I can't believe I forgot to tell you to that. In fact, the previous (first) command I gave you might even work if you run it as an admin. For changing permission you absolutely have to have admin permissions, and unless you have UAC disabled like me (probably why I forgot to mention it) then command prompt always gets run without admin permissions. It's basically Microsoft's way of helping to prevent people from accidentally causing their computer harm, since most people have no idea what command prompt does. Without elevated permissions, you can't do much damage.

Sorry again for the delay. I hope you've gotten it all worked out.

Lyrical MC · 16 Jan 2012

Hey sorry for lack of activity, been unable to get back here till now. Anyway ran the same command as Administrator and got the following:

Files still the same as before.

Slammer · 17 Jan 2012

Sheesh... Are you able to delete the $Recycle.bin folder on your drive? You might try to download and install Malwarebytes (if you haven't already) and use its FileAssasin tool to try to delete that folder, since it seems like that might be the only one that's causing problems.

It might also be possible to get that command to work by booting your computer into safe mode (with command prompt!) and then running the command. Only issue you may have is getting your computer to load the drivers for your drive, but with a little luck that method will work.

Just so I can get an idea of what's on your drive, can you post a screenshot of the folder system? This is really bizarre. I can't imaging how your computer is managing to deny access after using that command. It's like the ace in the hole of permission errors... So let's see how far these ideas get you!

Lyrical MC · 17 Jan 2012

After having followed the advice here yesterday tried downloading and installing a programme and I wouldn't allow me to run the install file. Got some sort of error message, this occured for any programme I downloaded as well as things such as trying to access system restore:

^the system restore variation of the message.

Got advice from someone else that thought this was probably a corrupt user profile. Tried to create a new one but none of the options that require administrator access would do anything once selected.

Not sure if this was related to the command run yesterday or simply was like this before and had just never checked anything like that.

Thinking it's wiser to try and resolve first before the external drive problem?

Thanks.

Slammer · 18 Jan 2012

As long as you only used that command on your external drive and not your normal hard drive letter (the one with your windows installation) that command shouldn't have caused this. If you did run it on your main drive letter by accident, however, that is very possible. I really hope you didn't accidentally that though, because I'm not sure how you would remedy that... hopefully you were careful and that didn't happen :)

In which case you likely either have some nasty malware on your computer, or maybe a corrupt hard drive or windows installation. Whatever is causing you to not be able to do admin tasks is probably responsible for your problems with your external hard drive, so we definitely want to look at this first like you said. I don't know if we already asked this, but are you able to access the files on your external HD on a different computer?

Finally, see if you can access any of these functions while in safe mode.