External Hard Drive (F is not accessable Access is denied)

[TechWizard86]

I'm at my wits end. I have a WD My passport 320GB hard drive that is read as 0 bytes and RAW filesystem. when I try to open it I get "F: is not accessible, access is denied." But in the Disk Management console it appears healthy and says the filesystem is NTFS. I've tried everything. I've ran chkdsk, I've tried fixing permissions at least three times, I've reset the attributes to all the files (chkdsk says it didn't find any problems with it and 0KB in bad sectors) and I don't know what else to do. I can't access the drive at all. I have too much important data to reformat my drive. Please assist. Recently my hard drive got hit with the autorun virus and it set a lot of my folders to hidden and the checkbox to undo the hidden properties was greyed out and I was unable to unhide them. I removed the autorun virus and my hard drive was working fine after.

 

[seth500]

External Hardrives have an autorun feature and some firewall suites such as mine (outpost security suite) won't allow autorun to execute until you configure the suite to do so. Autorun virus protection is starting to find it's way in antivirus software..I don't know but you may check that, it seems you've done everything else..

 

[brady]

Take ownership of the drive and set the "everyone" group to full control and propagate to child folders.

Take Ownership of file - Vista Forums

 

[DeaconFrost]

Have you tried connecting the drive to another computer?

 

[whs]

I would try to access it with a live Linux CD and copy my files. Then you can start from scratch. The virus probably left a lot of damage behind.

 

[TechWizard86]

Have you tried connecting the drive to another computer?

Yes I have attached it to my XP machine and it opens up just fine. It's just on Windows 7 that it does not open.

 

[brady]

Set the Everyone group to full control while it's connected to the XP Machine.

 

[TechWizard86]

Take ownership of the drive and set the "everyone" group to full control and propagate to child folders.

Take Ownership of file - Vista Forums

Yes I just took permission of the entire drive and I'm still getting Access is Denied. I have no idea as to what else to do.

 

[brady]

Are you able to open the Security Tab through properties on this Drive?

Properties / Security (tab) / Click Edit / Click Add / Type Everyone / Click Check Names (it will underline) / Click Ok / Click the check mark next to "full control".

Do you get an error?

 

[TechWizard86]

Set the Everyone group to full control while it's connected to the XP Machine.

I've done that but because of the security settings Windows 7 made, it leads up to "The directory is corrupted and unreadable. Please run the CHKDSK utility." This happens on a number of files. CHKDSK identifies it as an invalid security descriptor. It's an endless cycle.

 

[TechWizard86]

Are you able to open the Security Tab through properties on this Drive?

Properties / Security (tab) / Click Edit / Click Add / Type Everyone / Click Check Names (it will underline) / Click Ok / Click the check mark next to "full control".

Do you get an error?

No, it sets the permissions and I still get Access is Denied. Yes, I can open the Security tab.

 

[Britton30]

In case the virus/trojan/worm is still there, run both MalwareBytes and Super AntiSpyware. Links in my sig. Update both and run full scans.

 

[TechWizard86]

In case the virus/trojan/worm is still there, run both MalwareBytes and Super AntiSpyware. Links in my sig. Update both and run full scans.

I'll give that a shot and see how it goes. I use VIPRE for my AV.


(Update)

I scanned and found no viruses. As I suspected the autorun virus is not the problem. I am about to give up on this one. Also in My Computer on Windows 7 it shows up as RAW and 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free but in the Disk Management Console it appears as NTFS and healthy as well.

 

[blaxx]

I am also have the exact problem.
I run my external HD in linux, and everything looks fine, my F: drive can be read and write without any problem at all. But when I plugged into my laptop windows 7, it says "access denied".
Does anyone have any idea to resolve this??

 

[gregrocker]

It might save time to move the data off to wipe it with Diskpart Clean Command
and then create and format a new partition(s) in Disk Mgmt: Partition or Volume - Create New