External drives not accessible

Hi guys, firstly I'm new to this forum.

I currently have an issue on my notebook. When I plug in any external hard drive it appears in disk management as well as "my computer" ie.:



However when I try to access the hard drive I get this message:



I have researched this, but can't find anything posted anywhere. I have tried resetting ownership, but when I try to do that I get the same message. Access denied. This is not related to the drive as all external's I plug in has the same result and I get the same result regardless of the usb port I plug the drives in to. I have also tried restarting the laptop a few times. Also, I did not change any settings or anything. I plugged in a friend's external and it started doing this. I unplugged it and tried my external which was working fine and had the same result with that and every other external I've tried since. Could it be a corrupt registry file? Please assist urgently. Thanks in advance.

Hi ericksb,

Welcome to SevenForums.

The questions to be answered:

1. Were these externals accessible on this specific laptop before and suddenly turned inaccessible?

2. You tried your friend's external drive on this laptop and even that was not accessible. Did you try the other way - plugging in your externals into your friend's laptop?

To me it looks like that it is a company-owned laptop and the administrator has set it up that way - no USB storage devices.

"1. Were these externals accessible on this specific laptop before and suddenly turned inaccessible?" - Both these drives were working previously on the laptop in question. Both drives are company-owned, it is for back-ups we are not always at office and our back-up server does not work over 3G as data costs in SA are to expensive, so you have to be on our local network. My drive still works in other pc's. This problem only started occurring last week Friday after I plugged in my friend's ( work colleague) drive. Also, this drive became inaccessible on his laptop (also company owned) last week Friday, that's why we wanted to test it in my laptop, after plugging it in, my laptop had the same issue as well, now all usb mass storage devices are inaccessible on both our laptops.

"2. You tried your friend's external drive on this laptop and even that was not accessible. Did you try the other way - plugging in your externals into your friend's laptop?" - I tried all three of my personal externals, 3TB (Seagate, 3.5"), 2TB (Verbatim 2.5") and a 500GB(Transcend 2.5"), on this laptop and get the same result, but all three these drives work on my personal PC (i5 4770k, 16GB Ram, AMD R9270x, 250GB Solid State, Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit).

"To me it looks like that it is a company-owned laptop and the administrator has set it up that way - no USB storage devices." - And no, this isn't the case as both the drives in question have previously worked on both the laptops in question.

OK, thanks for clarifying.

That both your laptops and your work colleague's started exhibiting the same problems of not recognising the USB drives does not appear to be a coincidence happening on its own.

The best course open to you is to take up the matter with your company's administrator.

I would consider anyone of us here meddling with your company-owned and administered property as inappropriate.