Access is denied - Error on My Passport

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

My Passport external drive appears in file manager when connected as a drive letter G:. When I attempt to access it, I get an error G:\ is not accessible. Access is denied. Running on Windows 10. Have the same error of two different computers.

Any ideas what is going on here?

2

Here is a list of symptoms when the external hard drive or other storage devices become inaccessible:

  • Access denied

  • File system error

  • Storage device driver is outdated

  • Device not formatted error

  • Unsupported file system

  • The request failed due to a fatal device hardware error

  • Unknown disk not initialized

Here I suggest you to immediately perform data recovery action on that drive or else there are chances you may lose your data permanently. For data recovery, I recommend you to try Stellar Data Recovery Professional Software as it helps the user to recover data from any storage device, corrupted or accidentally formatted drive and even recover lost partitions. You can check the video also for the same as below:

Once you’re done with the data recovery, find an effective solution to make the external hard drive accessible again:

Method 1. Gain administrator permission

  • Step 1: Open This PC, right-click the inaccessible external hard drive and select “Properties”.
  • Step 2: Go to Security, click “Advanced” and “Owner”.
  • Step 3: Click “Edit” and click your username under Group or username.
  • Step 4: Check all boxes under Allow column, click “OK” to confirm and “Apply” to keep all changes.

Reboot PC and reconnect the external hard drive.

Method 2. Update the external hard drive driver

  • Step 1: Connect the external hard drive to the PC.
  • Step 2: Right-click on This PC/My Computer icon, select Manage and go to Device Manager.
  • Step 3: Expand Disk drivers, find and right-click on the external hard drive, choose “Update driver”.
  • Step 4: Select “Search automatically for updated driver software” and wait patiently till the process completes.
  • Reboot the PC and reconnect the device.

Method 3. Check and fix file system errors

  • Step 1: Press Windows + R keys simultaneously to invoke Run. Type cmd in the empty box and hit Enter.
  • Step 2: Type disk part and click OK to bring it up.
  • Step 3: Type chkdsk G: /f /r /x and hit Enter.

Exit the command prompt and safely eject your external hard drive. After some time, try reconnecting it and see if you can open it normally.

Method 4. Format external hard drive, change file system to NTFS

Hope it will help you out.

3

My WD Passport External Drive became inaccessible one week after purchasing. I tried all of the suggestions provided on this site, without success.

The only way I could resolve it was to completely format the drive. It took two days to complete, but the drive is now functioning well since then. At first I was going to do a “Quick” format, but instead selected the complete format to ensure any and all problems were erased. The complete format took a little over two days.

4

That’s cool, however, complete formatting of the drive erased all your data from the drive… hope you have backups of your important data and you did not face any critical data loss situation!

5

This can happen if the external drive was connected to a different system or if something changed in Windows 10’s security settings. To resolve this, you can try adjusting the drive’s permissions by right-clicking on the drive in File Explorer, selecting “Properties,” then going to the “Security” tab and modifying the access rights https://www.hаndyrecovery.com/external-hard-drive-access-denied/. The issue of external hard drive access denied often requires resetting the ownership of the drive to your current user account. If this doesn’t resolve the problem, it could be related to a corruption of the file system, and running a CHKDSK might help.