Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file.......

Hello,

Working on an old Gateway laptop if you can believe that. I've been working on Windows machines for 20 years but I'm so stumped I don't even know where to start.

In a nutshell when I login with an Admin account I can't do anything. For example, I have a thumb drive with CCleaner on it and I'm blocked from installing it. I tried moving it to the desktop and it says C:\ is not accessible.

This is not the case, however, in Safe Mode. I have turned off the antivirus. I have used a Kaspersky Boot disk to remove a couple of malware problems. I have checked the Startup items for problems but don't see any.

This is an old computer someone gave to me to check out so I know little of it's history.

I cannot do anything with Users or Uninstalling programs.

Can you give me a place to start troubleshooting? I'm baffled.

All the best,

Luciano991

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

This is not the case, however, in Safe Mode

That would seem to point to an autorun doing something. Fire up MSCONFIG and go to the startup tab and see what's autostarting. If nothing is obvious, go to the first tab and choose "Diagnostic Boot", which is a step above Safe Mode.

OK, tried the diagnostic boot. The C drive is still not accessible and when you right-click on the C drive in Explorer and select Properties it's showing the C drive as having 0 bytes. Is there a hidden drive somewhere? I'm baffled. Tried User account with Admin privileges and tried the Administrator account as well.

Thanks for your interest, your patience and your support. What's next?

All the best,

Mark

It sounds like it has to be something that fires up in standard mode, and even diagnostic mode, but not in safe mode. Two thoughts come to mind. Can you use a browser to download and then execute a prog? If so, I would run either Autoruns or tweaking.com. Autoruns will give you a better view than msconfig. If you use it, save the existing profile before changing anything, or take a system image, or at least a restore point, if there is anything on the drive you want to preserve. Tweaking offers many repairs, including resetting permissions and repairing leftover malware effects. Sometimes it has to be run twice, when the first run makes things worse, but that is rare. One other thing you could try is creating a new administrative account.

Hello,

First of all, thanks very much for your help. I didn't have a direction to go in or a clue of how to proceed. I'm afraid my experiences will frustrate you as much as they have me.

I was able to get on another windows machine and download Tweaking.com. I could not get it to run on the troubled Gateway laptop. The error message was that I needed at least 2MB of free space in the C:\Temp folder. I cannot get at that folder.

I tried downloading Autoruns directly from the laptop on Majorgeeks but the IE browser is totally screwed. Just get ads and redirects, even had trouble getting Google to come up. So I may try to download Autoruns on the other Windows machine and go from there. At this point, I may have to pull the drive, copy as many files as I can from it, reformat it and start over. I hope there's some way those Gateway drivers are still on that hard drive and that I can find them.

I'm open to further suggestions.

All the best,

Mark

That sounds like a plan. I'll let you know how I make out.

All the best,

Mark