Windows 7 not recognizing and allowing access old backup drives.

[9TIGERS]

i finally got the chance to put togehter new pc. i installed windows 7 this morning and have been having nothing but problems.

I have three hard drives. all SATA. two of the drives i was previously using in a winXP machine as backup drives. basically i formatted them (NTFS, one of the dynamic disc) and dumped files on them for storage.

so i got through the install process and win7 is up and running ok. made sure it worked then plugged in my second and third storage drives from the XP machine. win7 recognizes one of them, it has a drive letter assigned and is listed as active and healthy in computer managment....however when i click on the drive i get message 'F:\ not accessible, access denied'

the third drive doesn't even show up in windows anywhere that i can find.

both drives are almost new and show up in my bios. they both worked perfectly in XP so i'm going to assume win7 is the problem. i just updated all my chipset drivers and still no luck. iv'e been searching forums all morning and still havn't come across a solution yet. any ideas?

[ua549]

Have you looked in Disk Management. Often you must manually assign a letter to a "foreign" volume.

It sounds like you do not have permission to access files on the F volume.

[9TIGERS]

thanks i just figured out how to get the dynamic drive functioning. for anyone that reads this in the future with same problem...right click the drive in computer managment (it should show up in computer managment with a yellow exclamation) it might not be obvious and listed as a storage device but it should be there (why i missed it) listed as 'Foreign'. right clicking it will give the option to import a foreign device. doing this makes the device readable and assigns a drive letter.

ok so second problem still exists...why am i being denied access to the other disc? do you think its because it was set when connected to the winXP machine to deny access in the permissions? The interesting thing is i can access the drive in safe mode.

[ua549]

You must have permission to access the volume. If you are a member of a group that does not have permission, you are denied access. It is the concept of least permission. The least permission overrides other permissions. If your user is a member of the Administrators group, make sure it is not a member of any other group.

You can always take ownership of a resource and then assign permissions as you see fit.

[9TIGERS]

cool that worked. permission / control was set to administrator. i went in in safe mode and changed/took ownership under my user name i created when i installed Win7. rebooted and got access to the drive. thanks UA549...much appreciated. now if i can figure out how to get this damn blurry text nice and crisp. cleartype adjust did little. hope i dont need to buy a newer lcd.

[ua549]

Did you simply turn on clear type or did you go through the full clear type adjustment process located in the fonts applet in control panel?

[9TIGERS]

Did you simply turn on clear type or did you go through the full clear type adjustment process located in the fonts applet in control panel?

both...i got it to work when i installed my new video card. that made a huge difference. previous to that i was using the onboard video with updated catalyst drivers (i dont think the most recent). i reinstalled the catalyst drivers from the supplied disc the second time with the new gfx card and all is nice and sharp now. wasn't paying attention and am not sure if they are different versions. will have to check later.