Properties "Security Tab" disappeared on external drive

Hi...

It has been awhile since I have been here. I anticipate (or at least hope) that this visit won't be as chaotic.

I recently switched back to Windows 7 from Vista a few weeks ago. I am running 32-bit Ultimate on an HP Pavillion laptop that has an AMD X2 64-bit chipset. It is running from one of two partitions on the laptop hard drive (the other partition is used to boot into Linux).

Additionally, I have 2 external drives. Each of these drives has two partitions. One of these drives is a 1TB backup drive that was recently added (the two partitions on this drive are for purposes of allocating half for use by Linux and half for use by Windows). The other external drive (which happens to be the former 2.5" hard drive of the laptop in a case providing USB connection) has two partitions, both of these were/are for use by Windows, however, one partition has an NTFS filesystem, and the other, so as to avoid irritations like the one I discuss herein, was FAT32.

I did a clean re-install of WIN7 (and Linux) about 3 days ago since my MBR was a little complicated and the reinstall was done to reorder the partitions thereby (hopefully) cutting down on fragmentation/drive use.

Anyway, today, for no real explainable reason, the NTFS partition of the older 2.5" external drive became inaccessible to me. Since I have encountered this issue in all post-NT versions of Windows when doing re-installations (i.e., the new installation of Windows does not recognize the external drive's owner SID, and (I am speculating here) therefore makes it inaccessible to the current user), however this was always easily remedied by taking ownership of that drive.

I know when I installed Windows 3 days ago I had access to this drive. But I also know I tweak things (safely) and situations can arise unexpectedly. When I try to take ownership of this partition/drive, the security tab in the properties menu is not present. The other 3 drives (Win partition/int. HD, Win partition/new external HD, fat32 Win partition/old external hard drive) are all fine...the two that are NTFS show the security tab. Obviously the FAT32 partition does not.

EDIT: I thought perhaps restoring a previous version on this drive might be of some use. However, when I checked under this tab, it states "Previous versions are not available for offline files". Don't quite know what that means... though I do know that soon after install, I disabled the Offline Files service. Didn't re-enable it because whatever this problem is, it seems to be affecting only the one external drive in question.

I looked under HKCR\Drive\shellex\ trying to spot an anomaly but it was a bit difficult, especially since I didn't know what GUID was for a particular drive. I checked under the Device Manager hoping to get these GUIDs, but under Storage Volumes, WIN7 shows 16 generic volumes, 7 of which are hidden.

So before going any further and risking a broken system, I thought I would let wisdom prevail and throw this question out to this forum.

Anybody know how I can restore the securities tab for that drive/partition so I can take ownership of it?

Note: I also tried using ICACLS with no luck, but I am only in the Administrator group. Again, I though I would post before jumping forward and invoking the Administrator account.

Thanks...
Paul