I just got a new external HDD last night. This morning I was trying to change permissions so that I was the only person on my computer who could access it. I searched and found that I could use "cacls M: /t /p user:n" in cmd, or some variation of that. I ended up completely cutting off access for everyone and I cant get into it or change it or anything. I'm pretty mad. I kinda want to throw it.

Also it already has about 20GB of stuff I loaded onto it last night, so I really dont want to format or anything, even if I could.I've been screwing with it all day and im sick of it by now. I ended up starting my recovery to see if there were any usable options, and accidently recovered my systems. theres 5 years of pictures, programs, and games i was working on gone. now my main hard drive is screwed up. after the recover i hade 10GB. within half an hour i had less than 1GB. all i want is my *censored* hard drive to work. will anyone please help?try using the command "cacls M: /t /p user:f" that should give you back control of the external drive.

for your system recovery: restore from backup or image. if you don't have that, you could call a company that does HDD recoveries but they're normally expensive or get OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro but it's not cheap.

good luckthanks but when I put that into cmd i get
"No MAPPING between account names and security ID's was DONE."

I think that because I dont have access to it I can not change the permissions.

thanx anyway though. Any other ideas, anyone?

I really wanted to take this with me to my dads tomorrow but i might have to take it to robotics and see if one of the engineers can get it if its not done tonight :-(the drive is attached to your computer, right??

if so, log in with admin privileges and take ownership of the folders. then change permissions through the security tab. don't FORGET to uncheck 'Inherited Permissions'


if it's a networked drive replace 'M' with it's IP address.no its attached. i booted in safe mode like articles I've looked at TOLD me too, and i dont have a simple file sharing option to uncheck, and the drive doesn't show up in my computer so I can't right click it.do you see the drive in the 'Disk Management Console'??You mean in safe mode right? Well yes. But I still can't turn off simple file sharing.ok, so you can see it in the 'Disk Management Console' but not in My Computer, right??

in 'Disk Management Console' does the disk show a drive letter??


have you tried powering down the external drive and plug the usb cable into a different port?? sometime that will force a reinstall of the drive.Whoa whoa...

you changed the permissions on the external drive, and somehow thought running your recovery partition/disc would fix it? and subsequently restored your internal drive to it's original state.



Classic.ok. I got everything. After setting up a network I had to boot into safe mode and now the drive is showing up in my computer. I have changed permissions and hopefully it FITS my needs.

my permissions are to completely deny 2 users here, and allow me, then i have administrators and everyone allowed. this will let only me on it on this computer, and any account on any other computer on it right?

Yeh BC, i might be dumb. lol. I thought in restore it would have some option to restore my external. I didn't see it so I clicked next, unknowing that that would start the restore. Ugh.

Eh oh well. I lost a lot of stuff but I'll get over it.