Not Accessible; Access is denied. Please Help!

A friends laptop recently started acting up, upon switching his laptop on, it starts to boot, goes to the windows loading screen and..."black screen" I have tried running chdsk on it and "no errors found", cant boot it in safe or normal mode. So we decided, simple, yank it out, plug it into my desktop, back up his "my library" and Outlook Emails, Format and re install a fresh copy of windows. All was going great until we realized we could not access the drive in any way to pull off his data. All it says is "H: is not accessible; Access is denied" I am running Windows 7 Ultimate, and the Laptop Drive (which is the patient) has Windows 7 Basic. My friend NEEDS the data and emails on the drive. Is there a way to access the drive to simply pull off what we need without having to do file recovery on it?

Thanks and Desperation

MeTaL

 

Try right clicking the drive, properties and click the security tab. You have to add yourself (account) in order to get access to the files, unless the drive's entire contents are encrypted. If it's encrypted then you'll need to know what software was used for the encryption, install it and provide a password to unlock the drive.

 

Actually, you need to take ownership of that drive within the security tab.

 

Thanks for the reply, After reading a few forums online, I tried this fix, but once i click "Properties" the security tab does not show up, my other drives(the ones i CAN access) have the security tab, My friend has not used any encryption software on his PC at all at any moment in the laptops life. This is why I am so stumped...

 

If you haven't tried, try starting up in safe mode to see if the tab appears. If not you can use the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) and see if for some reason the tab has been disabled. Open group policy editor and go to User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Explorer. Right click the Remove Security tab, click on Properties. Set it to Disabled or Not Configured and click OK.

Alternatively, if that doesn't work either you can use an Admin elevated command promt to issue the takeown command and try taking ownership from the command line.

 

Oki, I booted up in Safe Mode (Had not thought of that at all:-o) and had immediate access to the drive and all its contents. Why did this happen, and why did "this" solution help? I'd like to understand what you helped me fix. And THANKS!! I used to own a account with majorgeeks.com afew years back, and i can gadly say that this is still, as it was then, The BEST Technical Help Forum on the Web, Thanks you SO much Holiday and thank you again MajorGeeks.com! :-D