Vista - access denied to external hard drive

Folks,
I am trying to access my external hard drive, but keep getting "F:/ not accessible, access is denied". I can change the name of the "F-drive", but not access. This is happening even thu I am in Administration account.
I have recently accessed the same external hard drive to change security settings to all the files so that all users have full control. Was this a mistake to do?
there are very important data there that I need to access for my business..do I look at datarecovery software? or is that not gonna get me anywhere?
Please help.

I just had the same thing happen to me, and have many files that I need to
retrieve. Any help would greatly help both of us.

"ruanv" wrote:

1.Check do you have this problem in safe mode
2.Diagnose disk in looking for errors
3.Check you don't have some viruses

i have the same problem, but only on windows vista, on my xp pro machine, the
hdd works just fine, and in every other xp machine i've pluged it into, but
not on a machi that has vista, what ca it be?

"Flavius" wrote:

Same thing with me, only this happend to my C: drive. What should I do to
gane control again, do you know?


"ruanv" wrote:

On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:55:20 -0800, Steve
<Steve@xxxxxx> wrote:
FIRST... start your own thread because your situation is different
from the one being discussed. What you did is considered to be
hijacking someone else's thread.

Second... next time you pop into a thread, take a look at the dates of
the posts in it. If they are over a couple weeks old - in this case
they stopped 3 months ago - it's best to move on because most folks
will have started to ignore the thread after the first week, maybe
quicker..