"F:\ is not accessible. Access Denied"

I have an external hard drive that a friend gave me. It looks old, but I don't know much else about it other than that he is a techie and it was clean. I've had it for about 6 months or more, and it's been fine. I've got all my music, pictures, documents, etc. on it, and it's also what I back-up my computer on. My computer is a Dell Inspiron 1525 that runs Vista (32). Like I said, it worked fine for a long time.

Suddenly, I unplugged it, moved it to a different apartment, plugged everything back in, and now it gives me "F:\ is not accessible. Access denied." when I click it. It shows up, it shows how much is being used. I can change the letter (which doesn't do anything), and it reads NTFS in Disk Management and Healthy, as well. I don't understand what happened or what is wrong. We plugged it into my fiance's much older laptop and his apple desktop, and it worked just fine. It's got to be something on my laptop. Suggestions?!

 

Hello,
See if taking ownership of the drive helps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2wkaMFsh04

 

I wonder if it is a permissions issue. If you right-click the F: drive and select Properties do you see a Security tab?

Is your user name listed in the box?

Edit: Hey tgell, I was just thinking I wish I had a good guide to changing permissions settings.

 

Thanks, but it didn't fix it. What next?

 

Thank you!!! I wasn't, I guess. Not by name... anyway. So I added my name, and it worked! YAY!

 

Everyone is faster than me today. I was just going to ask if you used your personal user name.

Good work!

 

Any idea why this fixed it? Or why it was "broken" in the first place suddenly after having worked fine for so long? Just curious.

 

I can't really say why it happened in the first place. If you only used it on the same system there shouldn't have been a permissions issue because you always owned the files.

All I can say is that external drives are extremely prone to unexplained problems from what I have seen reading forums like this one. I don't know if it is something about the USB interface or what. But disconnecting them without using the "safely remove hardware" option in the taskbar seems to often be a problem. Even when using that option, externals can suddenly show as empty when they are full of data. Usually it can be fixed rather easily but I haven't been able to recognize an actual cause, which can be duplicated in order to verify, for why it happens.

You should be fine using your drive; if you ever have problems you can always try it in other computers to narrow down the problem and then try to find a fix.