Can't access external drive

[Walsingham]

I just discovered that I can't access my Story USB external hard drive. I need to shuffle some music around, but guess what? No dice.

 

What in the name of artificially sweetened star spangled f*** is going on? It's my hard drive. It's plugged in. I am using win7 professional, but I'm an administrator. Seriously.

 

EDIT: I can play music from it. I've also tried checking/unchecking the read only option.

Edited May 18, 2011 by Walsingham

[Pidesco]

Moved to the appropriate forum.

[Guest Slinky]

Does it give any error message, like you don't have enough rights/error/screw you?

[Gorgon]

Disk could be dying, could be you installed some new security software that is meddling with your permissions. Obvious thing to try is simply rebooting with the drive in, next is disabling system file protection, don't leave it off though it's there for a reason.

[Orogun01]

I assume that you checked the connection, does the system recognize the drive?

[Gfted1]

It must. If I understand correcly, he can access and play music from the drive, just not move the files.

[Walsingham]

Sorry about delay in replying. thanks everyone for trying to grapple with this.

 

- Yes the drive is recognised. I can access it and play music.

- I _believe_ I used to be able to move files around on it.

- I have tried disabling what I _think_ is file protection. 'Nothing' happens.

- Error message reads: well, there isn't one. deleting, copying, moving are all disabled. Don't even show up in the right click list.

[Gorgon]

Back up everything and format the thing i guess, assuming you have the space. If it doesn't work after that, I would toss it, not worth the risk.

 

Friend of mine had trouble moving stuff from his external HDDs and decided to run a defrag, half way through the program froze and the disks died. Lost everything on them.

Edited May 23, 2011 by Gorgon

[kalimeeri]

I've also tried checking/unchecking the read only option.

 

Still sounds like this is the problem, like maybe the whole drive has been made R/O, or it's being regarded as a CD.

Also, if this is the Story Station... just a thought, but as a backup device its contents may not be freely accessible by any other program but the backup software, for security/safety purposes. In otherwords, a glitch (feature!) in that software or driver (have you recently updated it?)? I've seen this happen way back when using floppies for backup with the old DOS PCTools (I think)--once the media was written to, all you could do with it was re-format. Perhaps check whether program access is exclusive?

Regardless, it may not be a Win7 problem per se. Even XP occasionally blocks full access to files copied from a CD or other source ... you will likely need a program like File Unlocker to deal with that.

Worth a shot anyway.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know: File Locking (Wiki)

Edited May 23, 2011 by kalimeeri

[Gorgon]

There is a backup feature in win 7, is that what you are using Walsh ?

[Gorgon]

^^ Well the files are fine as I understand it, he just can't move anything on the disk. How about rebooting into safe mode, that usually solves access problems.

[LostStraw]

Sorry about delay in replying. thanks everyone for trying to grapple with this.

 

- Yes the drive is recognised. I can access it and play music.

- I _believe_ I used to be able to move files around on it.

- I have tried disabling what I _think_ is file protection. 'Nothing' happens.

- Error message reads: well, there isn't one. deleting, copying, moving are all disabled. Don't even show up in the right click list.

Idea 1 -

a) Right Click on the Drive and select 'Properties'

b) Find and select the 'Security' tab

c) Make sure that that your user name or group has the 'Full control' permission checked

 

Idea 2 - Although it's not very common some external drives have a physical switch that will set them into read only mode.

 

Idea 3 - I'm stumped

[Walsingham]

No time to check at the minute, your solutions.

 

Noticed that the problem is specific to the 'unknown artist' folder. Some sort of WMP 7 bull****?

[Gorgon]

Ohh, well then it's definitely file protection. It's probably still marked as 'in use' or reserved by a process. Or still also possible, a hardware error.

 

Reboot in safe mode, change current user account settings to 'never notify', type in services.msc in your search field, go to administrative tools > services > protected storage. Turn it off.

 

While you are doing this stay off the web, you are running windows with its immune system off.

Edited May 25, 2011 by Gorgon

[Gorgon]

If that doesn't work, formatting still would.

[Walsingham]

That sounds pretty drastic. I'm tempted to just write off those particular files.