Here’s the scenerio: I installed VirtualBox to run Android x86 and stupidly mounted my external USB drives to the program. While one of my drives survived the dismount, the other one didn’t. When Windows tried to read the drive in question, it told me that I had to format it.
I wasn’t willing to lose 300 GBs of data so I did some Googling and came across EASEUS Partition Recovery (http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/) which worked like a charm as it recovered all 5 partitions from the drive.
The problem now was that Windows, for some reason, couldn’t read the first partition in Windows Explorer. It can see that it exists but just won’t list any information for it. Instead, it kept giving me an “Access denied” error.
A reboot into XP showed me that there was nothing wrong with the data on the partition since XP could read it just fine so maybe it really had something to do with permissions?
After some more Googling, I came across this thread and decided to try what the OP tried and downloaded TakeOwn from http://www.petri.co.il/download_free_reskit_tools.htm. (You’ll need to do an in-page Find/Search for it. As the programs are listed in alphabetical order, TakeOwn is toward the bottom.) I would recommend saving the file to the root directory of your drive so you don’t need to type a bunch of folders names to access it. (Of course, you can always copy the path from the Windows Explorer address bar and paste it into the command line for a quick directory change.)
Note that you’ll have to run the program from the command line and be logged in as the administrator. As I have a shortcut to the command line program on my desktop, I simply did a right click over the icon and selected “Run as administrator”. In case you need to find the command line program, it’ll be in your < whatever drive letter your Windows system is under >:\Windows\System32\ and the filename you’re looking for is cmd.exe.
Once you’re in the directory where Takeown.exe is, type takeown < drive letter of the partition you are trying to access >.
It should remove the protection from the partition and allow Windows to read it again. 😀
Please don’t ask me for troubleshooting advice if this method does not work. ^^;
koukoupuffs 