Windows 10: Access Denied on all external drives

I get Access Denied errors when opening external USB drives via USB and SD drives from the SD port on my laptop. I know that these drives are working fine on other machines.I cannot open the drive, change ownership, share the drive, or anything. My account is administrator and I have also opened prompts in admin mode, still get access denied errors. I can see the D: drive using disk management, it says it's healthy and has the expected amount of storage space. When I try to format the device it says it is offline, and open and explore also gives access denied.I have followed all steps on https

:)

 

Access Denied to any external drive

Hi,



Thank you for writing to Microsoft Community Forums.



I understand that you are facing issues with accessing external drives on your PC, as it gives access denied error. I certainly appreciate your efforts in trying to resolve the issue by following certain troubleshooting steps.



Let’s try a couple of troubleshooting steps and see if that helps.



Method 1:



Try resetting the permissions using icacls command and see if that helps.

1. Press Windows +
   S key together to open Search.
   
2. Now type CMD and select Run as administrator.
   
3. Accept the UAC prompts.
   
4. Type in the following command and hit Enter:
   
   ICACLS * /reset /t /c /q
   
5. Restart the PC
   

Method 2:



Enable built-in administrator and check if you are able to access the external drives. Kindly follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Now press Windows +
   S key together to open Search.
   
2. Now type CMD and select Run as administrator.
   
3. Accept the UAC prompts.
   
4. Type in the following commands one by one and hit
   Enter:
   
   net user administrator /active:yes
   

If you are able to access the drives in built-in administrator, then create a new user account using built-in administrator and check if you are still able to access the drives. Refer the article

Create a local user or administrator account in Windows 10



Let us know how it goes.



Regards,

Prakhar Khare

Microsoft Community – Moderator

 

Access denied to external drive

Thank you for the prompt reply. I spent some time working through the different suggestions you gave and on the linked pages, without success. I stopped short of formatting the drive or reinstalling windows. No other issues I can find.

Controlled Folder Access was not a problem.

Found the access denied issue on 3 different PCs. But no problem accessing an ordinary external flash drive (FAT32).

Running as Admin I can take ownership, apply that to all files and folders and I can also access the directory structure and copy files from DOS, running as admin.

And logged in from another Admin user account still has the same problem.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

 

External drive access denied

i have an external drive, its working fine, and at one day i cant copy anything to my external drive, adn a few days later i cant access the external drive

it said access denied. ive browse a solution in internet but none of those work, so can i get the solution?