Windows 10: Workaround to access data when: External Hard Drive "is not accessible. Access is denied."

I got the dreaded "[Drive] is not accessible" message after plugging my external USB hard drive into a new desktop computer.





The drive showed up fine in Disk Management, And after scouring the Internet for solutions, all of the Permissions were fine, as well is everything in the Security and Share tabs in properties. I even ran CHKDSK with no problems. Nothing I did allowed me to access the data on my drive.


Finally, after MUCH trial and error, I was able to access the folders within the drive by using Macrium Reflect. I usually use this program when cloning my hard drives, but I was able to use the program to "see" the folders in the drive that I could not access. I was then able to Right-click > Copy the folder names and then paste them into another drive, allowing me to backup all of my data before reformatting the inaccessible drive.


Here are the steps that I used:


After installing Macrium Reflect, select the "inaccessible" drive, and click the "Actions" button that is directly beneath it.







Select "Image this partition only…," make sure that Folder is selected under Destination, and click the "…" button.







When the "Browse for folder" window opens, you will be able to expand the drive and see the folders that are in the drive. You can Right click the folders and select Copy. This will allow you to paste the folder to another location, such as another external drive.









There may be another solution for accessing an "inaccessible" drive, but after much searching, I couldn't find anything. As I said, checking the Permissions and updating things in the Sharing and the Security tabs did nothing. I considered purchasing data recovery software, but was hoping to find a solution that wouldn't cost me upwards of $50 and $100. I opened Macrium Reflect to see if I could use the Clone option to figure out a way to transfer my data to another drive, but I stumbled upon this workaround solution instead.


I am posting this here so that, hopefully, someone else facing this problem can use this workaround to access and save their data.




- Eddie

:)

 

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Accessing a Hard Drive...

...from a dead laptop.

My girlfriend's laptop recently s**t the bed, and she has a lot of photos she would like to retrieve from it. I used a USB to IDE cable to try, but it's a no go. Her drive has Windows XP Home on it, and my system has Win7 x64. The computer recognizes the drive, but it wants me to initialize it, which I think may format it.

I don't know if it's formatted FAT32 or NTFS. Are there any suggestions on accessing the drive to pull all this data off of it?