Windows 10: Access denied to external drive

I have a high capacity NTFS formatted external drive that gives me Access denied error.


I previously had it permanently plugged into one of these, although infrequently used, and recently encountered this problem.

I have attempted all remedies I could find, on this and similar forums:

• I tried on a different Windows 10 Pro PC
• chkdsk /f
• sfc /scannow
• reset owner of all contents

I am working with Administrator privileges.

All these process executed successfully but did not enable access.

When I run CMD with administrator priviliges I do get read/write access.

I can see that I have effective ownership.

But I cannot gain access from within Windows even with Admin privileges.

It is not practical to backup the contents and reformat. I dont have a similar sized drive. 2000GB
What else can I try?

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?

 

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 in external hard drive

Access denied in external hard drive in windows 10