Win7 laptop cannot access drive from WinXP machine via USB drive dock.

William1415 · 13 Oct 2012

(I apologize in advance if this post isn't in the correct category. I couldn't see where to put it.)

Problem: Win7 laptop cannot access drive from WinXP machine via USB drive dock.

Background: I have a WinXP desktop machine with a hard drive that may have a virus/trojan/rootkit/etc. Normal scans on the WinXP machine with MSE or ThreatFire have not discovered the problem. But the best way to scan a drive is to remove it and treat it as a purely 'dummy' data drive plugged into a usb drive dock and run the scan from a clean machine. This way any infected programs and/or O.S. on the drive will have no control to mask or hide themselves.

My other computer is an HP Win7 laptop. So I removed the hard drive from the WinXP machine and via the USB drive dock and the Win7 laptop saw the WinXP drive icon appear. However, double-clicking that icon results in the popup window message:

"Location is not available.
J:\ is not accessible.
Access is denied."

Yet, on the Win7 laptop, clicking through "Administrative Tools", "Computer Management", "Drive Management", shows that the WinXP drive is recognized and 'healthy', i.e.

"MAIN (J:) Simple Basic NTFS Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)
Online."

(I tried to show helpful little screen captures of these messages for you, but the forum appears to delete them prior to posting.)

So why can't the WinXP hard drive be accessed and read by a Win7 computer?

NOTE: If I plug this USB drive dock into the WinXP computer then I can read the drive's files just fine. Also, the USB ports on the Win7 computer are fine. I use them often for various things.

A small mystery . . .

Thank you for your input!

- William1415

Mark Phelps · 13 Oct 2012

I've noticed on my PC that it "remembers" drive letters of drives that ONCE were connected via USB, even when the drive is no longer connected.

What you could try is opening the Disk Management utility, scrolling down through the list of "drives" until you see the external drive -- and seeing if a drive letter is shown there. IF it is, see if you can change the drive letter. If it is not, see if you can assign a drive letter.

William1415 · 13 Oct 2012

Thanks for your comment Mark.

Yes, the drive letter was already available. I changed it easily from J: to F:, but the drive was still not accessible.

- William1415

edwar · 13 Oct 2012

Have you tested this Drive Dock with another drive? I suspect it is the dock itself that is causing the problem. Try a different drive in the dock.

William1415 · 13 Oct 2012

Thanks for your comment Edwar.

Yes, in fact I have tried 2 different brands of USB drive docks. The WinXP drive can be accessed using either drive dock on the XP desktop machine.

Also, I have 3 idential drives (I use Acronis Migrate Easy to make perfect clones so that I have double backups). The point is, using either of the 2 drive docks or either of the 3 drives shows no difference, i.e. the drive is not accessible when using the Win 7 laptop.

I did try putting the drive back on the XP machine and selecting SHARING for the drive, which resulted in that drive icon sitting in the palm of a hand . . . if you have ever seen that. THEN when I tried to access the files from the WIN 7 machine, it suceeded. However . . . and this is BIZARRE, when I right-clicked on the drive icon and selected PROPERTIES from the context menu, the pop up message said the Recyle Bin was corupted and couldn't be emptied. WHAT? This makes no sense. I didn't even click on the recycle bin. I only tried to check properties of the drive icon. I tried again, and same result. So I tried running CHKDSK on the drive, and it finished, but when it did there were no files showing on the drive - as though they had been deleted. But from "Drive Management" I can see from the "% Used" that the files are still there. I don't expect any of this to make sense.

- William1415

- William1415