Access is Denied With External Hard Drive

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Recently I received a phone call from someone I know that had recently purchased a hard drive enclosure. This allowed them to use an internal hard drive as a USB 2.0 external hard drive. He was attempting to connect the hard drive on a new laptop with Microsoft Vista installed.

Every time he connected the external hard drive, he was always greeted with a message on the screen stating: “Access is denied”. He mentioned he was logged in with an administrator account, so I couldn’t see why he wasn’t granted access to the hard drive. That is when I thought about a good reason why he wasn’t given access.

Vista and Security

This is the first time I have seen a problem where someone logged in as an administrator was not granted access to an external hard drive. Trying to determine the issue over the phone was rather complex to say the least. It would have been easier if I had the laptop in front of me, but unfortunately I didn’t.

All who use or have used Vista know Microsoft has changed the security compared to previous versions of the Windows operating system. They included a new feature called “User Account Control” (UAC). It is meant to help keep your system more secure.

I found it very annoying while using Vista to the point where I just turned it off. In this instance I learned that it was Vista’s UAC that was causing the “Access is denied” message to appear.

While I don’t recommend you turn off UAC, if you are annoyed with it, you can turn it off with the following steps:

1. Open the “Control Panel” in Vista.
2. in the search bar at the top, type “UAC”.
3. Next, click the “Turn User Account Control (UAC) on or off” link.
4. In the next window, uncheck the “Use User Account Control (UAC)” checkbox.
5. Click the “OK” button to accept the changes.
6. Reboot your computer to have the changes take effect.

Turning off UAC allowed the person that had the issue access his external hard drive.

Afterwords, I decided to search online for other solutions, and many others indicate a permissions problem. Many were rather complex and took some knowledge of permissions to set. Over the phone, this wouldn’t have been an option.

About Paul Salmon

Paul Salmon is the founder of Technically Easy. He is a an experienced PC user, and enjoys solving computer-related problems that he encounters on a regular basis.

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