"Drive is not accessible, access denied" error carried over to cloned disk???

[nicky9499]

Gday gents,

 

I'm facing a very puzzling problem. Recently I updated an old W7 machine to W10.

It was a reformat/clean install, not an auto-upgrade install.

After the update, all the drives worked except for a 6TB Seagate Barracuda.

It simply displayed the dreaded "<drive letter> is not accessible. Access Denied." error message.

I have ruled out: motherboard SATA port fail, PCIe HBA card fail, SATA cable fail, and even tested the drive on another PC.

Also, obviously have checked the permissions and Administrator has full access to the drive.

 

So, as is befitting of Seagate's reputation, the logical conclusion was that this drive had also failed, still under warranty mind you. I cloned the drive using clonezilla live usb - this took 35 hours - to a new Seagate (it was a gift, I would never buy another Seagate these days) Ironwolf 8TB. After booting back into W10, hey, now both drives are showing me the Access Denied error message!

 

Ran chkdsk -f on both drives, both results ok. HD Tune shows both drives healthy, as does Disk Management. The target 8TB drive was empty but I did have a basic partition on it before and obviously that could be accessed on any PC (SATA/dock) no problem whatsoever. Anyone have any ideas what is going on here please?

 

[TomChaai]

It's just a permission issue. Have you tried diskpart clean the original drive after it is cloned? If it works after that, the drive is working.

[nicky9499]

I did diskpart clean on the 8TB (clone target) drive, all it did was format it. The drive can be accessed - after re-initializing it in Disk Management - but that does not fix the original Access Denied issue.

 

Assuming the original 6TB Seagate is not faulty, how does one regain access to his own drive showing an Access Denied error? I have gone through every conceivable security menu and given myself (the bloody Administrator) every single right in the known universe. That being said, attempting to change the Owner to another Administrator or user account - as advised by every half-bit data recovery advertorial masquerading as a blog - results in the screenshot I attached in the original post.

[TomChaai]

23 minutes ago, nicky9499 said:

I did diskpart clean on the 8TB (clone target) drive, all it did was format it. The drive can be accessed - after re-initializing it in Disk Management - but that does not fix the original Access Denied issue.

 

Assuming the original 6TB Seagate is not faulty, how does one regain access to his own drive showing an Access Denied error? I have gone through every conceivable security menu and given myself (the bloody Administrator) every single right in the known universe. That being said, attempting to change the Owner to another Administrator or user account - as advised by every half-bit data recovery advertorial masquerading as a blog - results in the screenshot I attached in the original post.

I mean you copy from drive A to drive B, then clean drive A to see if there are indeed hardware failures, my theory is there is none.

You somehow denied yourself access to change the ACL of the drive, which I believe is due to the your current account not matching what is on the volume ACL.

Can you list the current ACL for the volume root by going to security tab then "advanced"? See who is the owner and who is listed on the ACL for what permissions?

[nicky9499]

3 hours ago, TomChaai said:

I mean you copy from drive A to drive B, then clean drive A to see if there are indeed hardware failures, my theory is there is none.

You somehow denied yourself access to change the ACL of the drive, which I believe is due to the your current account not matching what is on the volume ACL.

Can you list the current ACL for the volume root by going to security tab then "advanced"? See who is the owner and who is listed on the ACL for what permissions?

Sorry Tom, can you elaborate what "ACL" means please? I did google but it turned up results of mostly anthropological nature. As for the question of "who is the current owner" of the source drive...you're not going to believe this, but it's the exact account and machine I'm trying to access it from. I am the owner. The last time I had to deal with this level of Microsoft stupidity was fixing Windows network file sharing.

[TomChaai]

1 hour ago, nicky9499 said:

Sorry Tom, can you elaborate what "ACL" means please? I did google but it turned up results of mostly anthropological nature. As for the question of "who is the current owner" of the source drive...you're not going to believe this, but it's the exact account and machine I'm trying to access it from. I am the owner. The last time I had to deal with this level of Microsoft stupidity was fixing Windows network file sharing.

Access control list. The thing you see when you open the security tab of a directory. 

It’s probably the reset that botched it, the file system ACL is working exactly as it should, rejecting access to those who did not have it. 

The owner of the volume or the names of the ACL entries may be look same, but they probably refer to different security principals due to the reset, causing access to not work. This is my theory. 

[nicky9499]

Thanks for the clarification. Here is what the original drive's ACL looks like (after diskpart clean and reinitialized)

 

 

Everything looks correct. What else can I do to reset it? Is there some kind of bootrec /fixmbr command line equivalent for GPT storage disks? All the data is just sitting there. I could use something like Stellar Phoenix pull stuff off but that would take days for a drive this large.

[TomChaai]

38 minutes ago, nicky9499 said:

Thanks for the clarification. Here is what the original drive's ACL looks like (after diskpart clean and reinitialized)

 

 

Everything looks correct. What else can I do to reset it? Is there some kind of bootrec /fixmbr command line equivalent for GPT storage disks? All the data is just sitting there. I could use something like Stellar Phoenix pull stuff off but that would take days for a drive this large.

Cancel and choose advanced on the last window, see from there.

[nicky9499]

Same thing:

 

If I try to change it to another user (also has admin rights) and click Apply, I get the error message shown in the first post.

[TomChaai]

7 hours ago, nicky9499 said:

Same thing:

 

If I try to change it to another user (also has admin rights) and click Apply, I get the error message shown in the first post.

On Windows 10, the owner of the partition root directory should be "SYSTEM".

Try if you can set the owner as SYSTEM.

[nicky9499]

Hi Tom, I don't mean to come across as rude and hope this doesn't, but I have pointed out on three separate occasions in this thread:

 

> Attempting to save the ACL settings results in the error shown on the first post.

 

 I'm not unfamiliar with Windows permissions/ownership. However in this case it is not behaving as it is supposed to and generally not making any sense.

[TomChaai]

9 hours ago, nicky9499 said:

Hi Tom, I don't mean to come across as rude and hope this doesn't, but I have pointed out on three separate occasions in this thread:

 

> Attempting to save the ACL settings results in the error shown on the first post.

 

 I'm not unfamiliar with Windows permissions/ownership. However in this case it is not behaving as it is supposed to and generally not making any sense.

I know you mentioned trying to access it results in "access denied". I'm just suggesting to try every possible angle from the settings window.

If all not working, we may need to try some other way to set it.

[nicky9499]

Life has gotten in the way the past few weeks and I haven't had time to work on this pile of Microsoft crap, until now.

Very quick summary of some of the developments thus far:

 

- Quick formatted the origin drive so that it would show up as a normal drive - aka non-locked - in Windows. (Success)

- Used Stellar Phoenix recovery software to do a deep search. (Partial success)

- While all the files were recovered, most of them were corrupted somehow. I ran this two times to two target drives, each pass would take the better part of a week and the result was the same. I cannot fathom why this is happening. The origin drive is not Bitlocked, does not have compression enabled, or any sort of security or encryption on it. Simple files like .txt can be opened, but movies and photos in the destination drive are corrupted.

- Used TestDisk to restore the partitions on the source drive. (Success)

- Disk shows up in Windows with the original name, and also the original Access Denied problem. Back to square one.

 

@Tom, you say "we may need to try some other way to set it", can you please list exhaustively all the ways?

 

[nicky9499]

On 8/11/2022 at 11:54 PM, TomChaai said:

I know you mentioned trying to access it results in "access denied". I'm just suggesting to try every possible angle from the settings window.

If all not working, we may need to try some other way to set it.

Bump.