Denied external drive permission after factory reset

If it was me I think I would cut my looses and do a clean install. Things just seem to be going from bad to worse. Thats not meant as a criticism, just an observation. With a new install and a new user profile you'll be back to just the original problem. With some luck maybe that will fix itself too.

Slammer said:

As long as you only used that command on your external drive and not your normal hard drive letter (the one with your windows installation) that command shouldn't have caused this. If you did run it on your main drive letter by accident, however, that is very possible. I really hope you didn't accidentally that though, because I'm not sure how you would remedy that... hopefully you were careful and that didn't happen :)

In which case you likely either have some nasty malware on your computer, or maybe a corrupt hard drive or windows installation. Whatever is causing you to not be able to do admin tasks is probably responsible for your problems with your external hard drive, so we definitely want to look at this first like you said. I don't know if we already asked this, but are you able to access the files on your external HD on a different computer?

Finally, see if you can access any of these functions while in safe mode.

Suspected it might have been that, but I copy and pasted the one posted here so doubtful. Thing is I was able to do admin tasks before so I don't know. I'll try and borrow a laptop later on tonight and see if the external works on there. Yeah tried safe mode too and same issues occur. Will report back later.

alphanumeric said:

If it was me I think I would cut my looses and do a clean install. Things just seem to be going from bad to worse. Thats not meant as a criticism, just an observation. With a new install and a new user profile you'll be back to just the original problem. With some luck maybe that will fix itself too.

My thoughts as well, haven't had access to my recovery disk through out the week though, will get them tomorrow.

Thanks for all the help and patience here from both of you, really appreciate it.

alphanumeric said:

If it was me I think I would cut my looses and do a clean install. Things just seem to be going from bad to worse. Thats not meant as a criticism, just an observation. With a new install and a new user profile you'll be back to just the original problem. With some luck maybe that will fix itself too.

I've been following this thread for the past couple days because I'm having the same problem. I have four external drives I've been using regularly that store and serve my movies and music files. The fact is that everything was fine until I just did a clean install of a DELL Windows 7 OS, and upon first run all of the external drives have denied access and all folders are merely "shortcuts". I have since redone clean installs several times, and the same occurs. I've completed the installs in exactly the same way, with the same user account settings as I always have, so there's no reason for it to have changed unless it's something in the OS software. I have gone in and taken ownership of every external drive, and set full control permissions for every account, but nothing changes.

Bottom line is that I've tried recommendations from here and other forums, but none actually seem to have any effect. Oddly enough, if I copy a new file/folder to one of these drives, I get full access to it, but still none of the existing files/folders on the drive. They still display the same "shortcuts" which lead nowhere, and deny access. Lastly, I have switched to the hidden Admin account, and only some of the permissions to access the external drives were restored.

For those who have inaccessible files on their drives they want to recover, try using Hiren's BootCD and run the portable WinXP on that. You should be able to access all of those files to copy elsewhere so you don't lose everything.

This is just too weird that doing a clean install results in this. This has happened to me twice recently on a desktop and a laptop. Only on the laptop it only effected every flash drive I've plugged into it. I'm starting to suspect the USB ports as the cause since it only affects drives plugged into them.

Stacman said:

alphanumeric said:

If it was me I think I would cut my looses and do a clean install. Things just seem to be going from bad to worse. Thats not meant as a criticism, just an observation. With a new install and a new user profile you'll be back to just the original problem. With some luck maybe that will fix itself too.

I've been following this thread for the past couple days because I'm having the same problem. I have four external drives I've been using regularly that store and serve my movies and music files. The fact is that everything was fine until I just did a clean install of a DELL Windows 7 OS, and upon first run all of the external drives have denied access and all folders are merely "shortcuts". I have since redone clean installs several times, and the same occurs. I've completed the installs in exactly the same way, with the same user account settings as I always have, so there's no reason for it to have changed unless it's something in the OS software. I have gone in and taken ownership of every external drive, and set full control permissions for every account, but nothing changes.

Bottom line is that I've tried recommendations from here and other forums, but none actually seem to have any effect. Oddly enough, if I copy a new file/folder to one of these drives, I get full access to it, but still none of the existing files/folders on the drive. They still display the same "shortcuts" which lead nowhere, and deny access. Lastly, I have switched to the hidden Admin account, and only some of the permissions to access the external drives were restored.

For those who have inaccessible files on their drives they want to recover, try using Hiren's BootCD and run the portable WinXP on that. You should be able to access all of those files to copy elsewhere so you don't lose everything.

This is just too weird that doing a clean install results in this. This has happened to me twice recently on a desktop and a laptop. Only on the laptop it only effected every flash drive I've plugged into it. I'm starting to suspect the USB ports as the cause since it only affects drives plugged into them.

How big are these files and what file extension do they have. Maybe they really are only shortcuts to the original files that aren't there any more because they were nuked by the factory restore?

I never did a factory restore. The drives (containing avi's, mp4's, mp3's, and other assorted file types) were all complete right up to the time I did a clean install and ran the new install the first time and then connected the externals. The externals were off during install, and the original files are still there because I can see them and access them using Hiren's BootCD, but not from within the OS. The shortcuts lead to nowhere in the Windows>System32 directory.

I'll post a screenshot in a little bit...

This is what the external drive looks like from within the OS. The files are hidden because they show up running Mini XP in the Hiren BootCD Disc. The shortcuts shown here point directly to cmd.exe in the Windows>System32 directory. The same thing happens on every external and flash drive. Every user has full control, I've changed ownership to each user with no difference. If I copy a new folder to any of the drives it gives me direct access to that folder, while the other display the same shortcut, and as soon as I disconnect the external drive or reboot and come back to that drive, the folder I just transferred displays only the shortcut.

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What does disk management or My Computer show for space used on those drives? Are you sure you are copying the folder and not just creating shortcuts to them? They all show up as 2 KB files in your screen shot so I have to ask. I really would like to see a screen shot of those disks in disk management. If you use the snipping tool you don't have to show the whole screen.

I can provide a screenshot later in the day, but I should say that I have a BS Computer Science and have been working with hardware/software for 20 years now, so I'm sure I'm not copying shortcuts.

Each of the external drives are 1 TB, and currently have approximately 500 GB free on each. Like I said, I've been using two of the drives for well over a year, and one I just bought last week, so something is going on with the OS, or possibly the BIOS. All 3 drives show a healthy status in Disk Management. All were being used on Windows 7 machines (laptops and desktops), and served as the host drives for serving media throughout the house until just recently when I did one of my routine refreshes (clean installs) of the OS's, and got this on each. Taking ownership of each makes no difference at all. The fact that I can access the files thru a 3rd party software is of little use because if I can't get the OS to recognize more than a shortcut, I can't use any of them for their hosting duties since I can't scan them to build the library.

I used to think a clean install solved most all problems, but that's obviously not the case. If I could get MS to respond I might get somewhere, but I'm not holding my breath waiting.

I've seen a lot of posts asking about the same problem, but none have led to a conclusion and/or a fix. All I keep seeing is take ownership, or even using the hidden Admin account, but neither work.

What do you see if you set explorer to display hidden and system files?