Win 10. -. External hard drive issue.

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Got a new laptop and moved my Seagate USB external hard drive to it. It shows up as E drive, healthy primary partition. ESET and Malwarebytes can both scan it just fine.

But when I try and browse it I get E: drive not accessible, access denied. Tried making it a G drive, that worked, but then cannot access the G drive. Tried to take ownership and that did not seem to work. I could not take ownership.

I think I have seen this issue before, but cannot remember what I did to resolve it. And Win 10 seems to have added in some of the active directory pieces, even though this is my home PC on personal network.
 
Try to run chkdsk on it. Could just be something stupid like a damaged file table or whatever. If you plug it into your old PC, is it readable? Are other USB devices readable?

Alternatively, try booting to a Linux USB key and see if you can read it there.
 
Do you have two external hard drives of the same make? That can cause an issue, you need to change one of the properties in one to have them bit accessible by windows.
 
Originally Posted By: Donald
I am thinking it's related to the old laptop being Win 10 home and new laptop being Win 10 Pro.


That shoots my best guess right out the window: I thought maybe your external drive had been encrypted by the prior OS, but I don't think Win10 home features BitLocker or whatever Windows calls their built-in encryption.
 
Originally Posted By: JC1
Do you have two external hard drives of the same make? That can cause an issue, you need to change one of the properties in one to have them bit accessible by windows.



No
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
Originally Posted By: Donald
I am thinking it's related to the old laptop being Win 10 home and new laptop being Win 10 Pro.


That shoots my best guess right out the window: I thought maybe your external drive had been encrypted by the prior OS, but I don't think Win10 home features BitLocker or whatever Windows calls their built-in encryption.


As I said, both ESET and Malwarebytes can read the drive.
 
Have you tried disabling your AV to make sure it isn't blocking access to external drives?

Have you also tried browsing using an elevated command prompt or powershell?

I'll also say different editions of windows 10 should not matter in this case.
 
Donald,

Not trying to steal your thread but I've had my own computer issues the past few weeks. It wasn't until I read your thread that I realized I might have my own Seagate problem. I've been experimenting with Linux Mint and I actually forgot to see if Mint recognized my Seagate external drive my son got for me. Fortunately it did recognize it. Thinking about it now it wouldn't really be an issue for me if it didn't recognize it. I've never even used it. I guess it's nice to know I could if I wanted to though. Good luck with your Seagate problem.
 
Originally Posted By: Sierra048
Donald,

Not trying to steal your thread but I've had my own computer issues the past few weeks. It wasn't until I read your thread that I realized I might have my own Seagate problem. I've been experimenting with Linux Mint and I actually forgot to see if Mint recognized my Seagate external drive my son got for me. Fortunately it did recognize it. Thinking about it now it wouldn't really be an issue for me if it didn't recognize it. I've never even used it. I guess it's nice to know I could if I wanted to though. Good luck with your Seagate problem.


Linux will read and write to FAT32 and NTFS-formatted drives without issue. Windows will not natively read from or write to any of the various Linux file systems. There are usually 3rd-party utilities to allow read/ write with some of the more popular.
 
Originally Posted By: Donald
Got a new laptop and moved my Seagate USB external hard drive to it. It shows up as E drive, healthy primary partition. ESET and Malwarebytes can both scan it just fine.

But when I try and browse it I get E: drive not accessible, access denied. Tried making it a G drive, that worked, but then cannot access the G drive. Tried to take ownership and that did not seem to work. I could not take ownership.

I think I have seen this issue before, but cannot remember what I did to resolve it. And Win 10 seems to have added in some of the active directory pieces, even though this is my home PC on personal network.


What shows up if you run diskmgmt.msc?
 
OK, since this was considered a business laptop because it was HP ProBook laptop, HP has installed an HP Device Installer that would block access to external harddrives. Most companies do this on company laptops. I did not expect this on a laptop shipped to a person. HP Support had me uninstall it and the external hardrive now works fine.
 
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