MyBook ACCESS IS DENIED! PLEASE HELP!

Hi everyone. 

I’ve had this WD MyBook 500GB Home Edition since 2008. I’ve never had any issues. Went through Windows XP to Vista and in the last 2 years Windows 8 without any issues until TODAY!!! 

Every time I connect the drive, the system tells me: “J:\ is not accessible” followed by “Access is denied”

I’ve always used this drive connected via the eSATA cable and in the last two times (last week), I remember switching using the FireWire 400 cable – I wonder if this change might have set something off???

I tried several things:

Restoring to an earlier date

switching the different cables: connecting via USB, and back to eSATA and I still get the same error message.

Changing the sharing permission settings to EVERYONE. Allowing: Full Control, Change, Read.

FYI:

Drive does show up in the devices (as you can see in the insterted image), also when I’ve checked on the drive for errors, the system confirms that IT IS WORKING PROPERLY according to Windows.

Running Windows 8 64

I own the MY BOOK HOME EDITION 500GB model WD5000H1CS-00

Toshiba Satellite Laptop P505 S8950

So nothing has helped thus far. I have very important files I’d like to save; I hate to lose them just like that. 

I’m sure by now WD figured out a solution to this. I would greately appreciate it if anyone could help me out here. Many thanks in advance.

-Victor :manmad:

Vicfilm,

Do you experience the same results when you test this particular disk drive on a different computer system using an older Operating System such as Microsoft Windows Vista or Microsoft Windows 7? Even though your disk drive was accessible in Microsoft Windows 8, I would recommend this test in order to explore the possibility of driver corruption. If this behavior is the same then it may be possible for the File System/Partition Table itself unfortunately displaying symptoms of corruption.

Thank you for your suggestion. I will try that and post the results very soon.

Cheers,

Vic :confounded:

I FOUND A SOLUTION!!! :smileyvery-happy::laughing: I couldn’t be any happier. I’m so glad I did. I was ready to dump this drive in the trash can. Third time’s a charm! haha :laughing:

My equipment/software:

-Windows 8 64

-WD MyBook Home Edition 500GB

-Toshiba Satellite p505 s8950 laptop

So after much trial and error, this is what worked for me:

  1. I went to the file explorer Icon to open up my computer’s visible hard drives and folders. (This would probably be found under My Computer in previous Windows versions.

  2. Find your drive. Under my WD Drive, I right clicked to open PROPERTIES.

  3. Then opened up SECURITY. Then on the GROUP OR USER NAMES window, your user names are most likely missing too, so you need to find your user names and adde them to have permission to access your drive.

  4. Click EDIT (to change permissions).

  5. Now click ADD. That will open the “Select Users or Groups window.

  6. Go to ADVANCE on the lower left corner.

  7. Click FIND NOW on the right.

You should be able to see a list of names under the “Search Results: Name / In Folder” box on the bottom. You need to select the appropriate names. What I did as a guide, I opened up another WD External drive that I already own and wrote down the user names that It had listed in the same window to match those for the affected WD drive. According to my other drives, the names were:

“AUTHENTICATED USERS”

“SYSTEM”

“ADMINISTRATORS

“YOUR USER NAME HERE/ADMINISTRATOR”

and lastly

“USERS (YOUR USER NAME IN PARENTHESIS)”  

  1. ADD THE NAMES - You can select more than one name or just one at a time.

  2. When all names are selected, hit OK .

AND THATS IT.

NOTE: You might want to restart the computer and re connect the WD drive to make these changes effective because at first when I finally was able to open the drive, when I clicked on the folders, some of them  WERE EMPTY, yet when I clicked on the Hard Drive disk space info, it showed it was almost full (400GB +) It didn’t make sense.

When I restarted my PC and re connected the drive again, EVERYTHING WAS THERE AND BACK TO NORMAL. Phewww! What a relief!!! Anyway, I hope these helps any of you and save you lots of headaches and time in any way. If I encounter any issues with this drive, I’ll let you know.

I’m going for a drink now. Have a good one, everyone.

Cheers!!

-Victor

1 Like

Permissions have been a messs since Vista came out! Sometimes you have to use Take Ownership also.

Joe

I had this problem and it appeared to be due to me switching to using a Microsoft account as my Windows login after I had previously used the MyDrive with a local account. Once I switched back to using a local login the issues went away and I was able to login without issues.

THAT WORKED!!! Thanks SO much! I tried a bunch of things and your solution is the one!

Thanks very much for your explanation.i do not know why my mybook did this but your instructions sorted out my problem.thank you again