Unable to display current owner

1. I was already running from an elevated command prompt, so that's not it.

2. I had already tried going back to each of my previous restore points, with no change to this issue.

Thanks.

Good morning.

Let's try something with permissions:

1. Right click your D drive > Click "Properties" > Click the "Security" tab (if you can't find the security tab, go to disk management, right click on D there, then click properties).

2. Now click the "Continue" button if it's there. Permissions box will open up.

3. Now click "Add" button. Type in the Username of the current windows user account you are logged in into the text box.

4. Now your username will appear under 'Group or usernames'.

5. Select your username from that list.

6. Under 'Permissions for <username>', click the check box against "full control" under the 'allow' column. Make sure all check boxes are checked under the Allow column.

7. Click OK. Now wait and watch a bit and click continue whenever asked.

8. Now try accessing the drive. If still not accessible, try after a reboot.

Hope this helps.

When I right click on my D: drive and select Properties, then select the Security tab, I see the message "You do not have permission to view or edit this object's permission settings."

There's an Advanced button available, but it only leads to more instances of the message above, except for the Owner tab, which says "Unable to display current owner."

In your list of 8 steps, I can only do Step 1.

Click start -- right click Computer -- click Manage.

On the left pane, click Users and group.
On the right pane, right click 'Administrator' (the one which has "builtin admin account" as description).
Click Properties.
Uncheck 'This account is disabled' (or similar, I don't remember exactly) so as to enable the admin account and click OK.
Now logoff and log on to newly available Administrator account.

Now can you access D drive?

Now follow all those 8 steps and while adding username, make sure you enter the username of the account you were normally using.

Report back.

I'm sorry, I thought I had mentioned earlier that I had tried using the (normally hidden) Administrator account. Nothing changes when I use that account - still the same exact messages as before.

I appreciate the effort!

Ok lemme try a bit more:

Run elevated cmd.
Type this out: takeown /f d: and hit enter.
Now type this: icacls d: /grant <yourcomputersname>\simon:F and hit enter. You can find your computer name in device manager I suppose, at the top.

Now what happens?

If you can't find computer name, see here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-in/w...-computer-name

EDIT: OK, so actually I did not read your initial post properly. I think you've already tried this, now it's beyond my scope, sorry.

You could try this:

Backup data on D:
Delete the D drive using disk management.
Create new partition again.

Seems like some serious corruption went there.

Those last two commands give me "Error. Access is denied."

I agree, I should back that stuff up and recreate the volume, but unfortunately I have no more room anywhere to put it. I guess I'll live with it for a bit until I can get more storage space.

Thanks for hanging in there. I agree, it looks like some kind of corruption of the security/permissions bits.

I don't advice doing this, but if this had happened to me, I would have used a linux live distro such as Ubuntu and boot using it, then go to D and remove the 'System volume information' folder (I am not at all sure if permissions are stored here or not) and remove anything extraterrestial located at the root.

If you suddenly decide to do this (I don't advice so please) make sure you have your data backups. Some time ago I had played around with SVI folder, even somehow deleted it but Windows simply created a fresh copy again.