Connecting an external HDD caused secirity issue

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I have an external HDD that I used for backups, music and pictures on my old XP machine. I unplugged it and moved it to my new Win 7 machine and set it as the backup. Later, I received a ‘problem’ notification. The PC could no longer access the drive and told me that file records were unreadable and may be corrupt. I moved the HDD back to my old XP machine and ran chkdsk. It went about replacing ‘invalid security ids’ with default security ids’. What?! I’ve never seen anything like this before. I had assumed my partition file got blasted or something, but this security id business is new. Hopefully I can recover the data. I’ll reformat the drive and try it again on Win7.

Anyone ever heard of any issues with moving older HDDs to a new machine?

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I have an external HDD that I used for backups, music and pictures on my old XP machine. I unplugged it and moved it to my new Win 7 machine and set it as the backup. Later, I received a ‘problem’ notification. The PC could no longer access the drive and told me that file records were unreadable and may be corrupt. I moved the HDD back to my old XP machine and ran chkdsk. It went about replacing ‘invalid security ids’ with default security ids’. What?! I’ve never seen anything like this before. I had assumed my partition file got blasted or something, but this security id business is new. Hopefully I can recover the data. I’ll reformat the drive and try it again on Win7.

Anyone ever heard of any issues with moving older HDDs to a new machine?

When you unplugged your drive did you dismount it first? You could have corrupted it otherwise.

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I didn’t dismount it. I thought corruption wwould only happen if there was a read/write activity happening. Chkdsk actually restored the disk, so I’m going to transfer the files via some other methos then dismont the drive and move it.
Thanks!

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Always use the safe to remove method on any USB device that writes data.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Problem is that there is no systray icon to remove the USB drive. I’ve powered down the old PC to remove the drive and we’ll see what happens…

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Problem is that there is no systray icon to remove the USB drive. I’ve powered down the old PC to remove the drive and we’ll see what happens…

Even without the system tray icon you should be able to select eject from the right click menu in Windows Explorer.

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With the USB drive connected, have you opened the Customize of the “Show Hidden Icons” up arrow?
There the setting NOT to show the Safe to remove Icon may be set.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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I managed to transfer all my files from the EHD using the File Transfer Function across my network. Yes, it took forever. So I powered down mu old PC that had the EHD attached, powered down the EHD, and disconnected it. I turned off the Win 7 machine and connected the EHD and powerd it up. I went to Explorer and tried to look at the EHD and I get the “Cannot access” message. So my old PC can read the EHD but not the Win 7 machine? Seems odd to me.

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I managed to transfer all my files from the EHD using the File Transfer Function across my network. Yes, it took forever. So I powered down mu old PC that had the EHD attached, powered down the EHD, and disconnected it. I turned off the Win 7 machine and connected the EHD and powerd it up. I went to Explorer and tried to look at the EHD and I get the “Cannot access” message. So my old PC can read the EHD but not the Win 7 machine? Seems odd to me.

That’s the same problem I’m having with my Kindle.

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I managed to transfer all my files from the EHD using the File Transfer Function across my network. Yes, it took forever. So I powered down mu old PC that had the EHD attached, powered down the EHD, and disconnected it. I turned off the Win 7 machine and connected the EHD and powerd it up. I went to Explorer and tried to look at the EHD and I get the “Cannot access” message. So my old PC can read the EHD but not the Win 7 machine? Seems odd to me.

See if Windows 7 Take Ownership & Grant Permissions to Access Files & Folder helps.

Joe

--Joe

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Both Bob and David,
Please post make and model of these external drives?

If either of these are home brewed, standard drive inserted in a third aprty encasment, then all bets are off.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Not home brewed…
I have a Maxtor 500gb Personal Storage 3200 external drive.

Both Bob and David,
Please post make and model of these external drives?

If either of these are home brewed, standard drive inserted in a third aprty encasment, then all bets are off.

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Well, what do you know? I changed all the permissions on the EHD to All Users and now I can access the drive. In teresting as I never set any security permissions on the drive on the old PC except for Netowrk sharing.

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Well, what do you know? I changed all the permissions on the EHD to All Users and now I can access the drive. In teresting as I never set any security permissions on the drive on the old PC except for Netowrk sharing.

You always get default permissions based on the user who first accesses/creates the object – drive, file, folder, etc. When you go from one OS to another even if the account names are the same the accounts are different to Windows. So, often you need to change/set permissions on the new OS to access the object in question.

Joe

--Joe

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Hi Joe,

I’ve got what looks like a similar issue.

I’ve just recently purchased a new laptop with Win 7, and when I plugged in the EHD that I used with the old XP laptop, it told me I didn’t have access rights, so I used right click on the drive name in Explorer to give my Win 7 user name (which has admin privileges) full access to the EHD.

Unfortunately, I still only have read-only access. Is there somewhere else I need to make a security change? I’d really like to run my back-up!

Thanks!

Ruth

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….I’ve just recently purchased a new laptop with Win 7, and when I plugged in the EHD that I used with the old XP laptop, it told me I didn’t have access rights, so I used right click on the drive name in Explorer to give my Win 7 user name (which has admin privileges) full access to the EHD.

Unfortunately, I still only have read-only access. Is there somewhere else I need to make a security change? I’d really like to run my back-up!…

Have you tried out the solution in Post #13 in this thread – or do you have issue with using that method? HTH

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Thanks for your help, Malcolm.

I’d rather not set it to All Users if possible – but I guess I’ll have to try that if there aren’t any other suggestions. Is there some reason why only allowing my own user name would not work?

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Thanks for your help, Malcolm.

I’d rather not set it to All Users if possible – but I guess I’ll have to try that if there aren’t any other suggestions. Is there some reason why only allowing my own user name would not work?

Personally, I’ve always used Authenticated Users – rather than All Users – as that narrows the scale to folks who have successfully validated their logon.

Behind each UserName is a SID (Security Identifier) – which is a long string of characters. These are protective mechanisms that go from machine to machine and sometimes get the better of themselves in trying to do their “job”. I believe that your old EHD has picked up an SID from your XP machine UserName & that is at the root of the problem.

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I’d rather not set it to All Users if possible – but I guess I’ll have to try that if there aren’t any other suggestions. Is there some reason why only allowing my own user name would not work?

Did you follow the steps in Windows 7 Take Ownership & Grant Permissions to Access Files & Folder?

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks for that, Joe.

No, I didn’t know that extra step of taking ownership. They sure know how to make life complicated!

Before I do this however, how will it affect access from other computers? The EHD is used with my Win 7 laptop at home, but also with another XP system at the office. Will taking ownership in Win 7 mean I can no longer access my work files at work??? When the EHD is plugged into the laptop, I have no way of assigning permission to the XP user, so it seems like I might lose access … which would not be helpful!

Ruth

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Before I do this however, how will it affect access from other computers? The EHD is used with my Win 7 laptop at home, but also with another XP system at the office. Will taking ownership in Win 7 mean I can no longer access my work files at work??? When the EHD is plugged into the laptop, I have no way of assigning permission to the XP user, so it seems like I might lose access … which would not be helpful!

If you have an issue with the drive on an XP system see How to take ownership of a file or a folder in Windows XP.

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks, everyone.

Taking ownership didn’t help either, but I found something that did work that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere here:

After taking ownership, checking and resetting permissions, I was still getting read-only files on my EHD and access errors every time I tried to do anything on the drive.

I went back into Properties (Right click on EHD top directory), Security/Advanced, selected my user name and clicked Change Permissions. I again selected my username, and then clicked in the box that says ‘Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object’, and then OK . It went through all the files (like it does when taking ownership and resetting permissions), but this finally got rid of the read-only status on all my files, and the pesky access errors.

I’ve double checked using the EHD on the office XP desktop, and it still works fine there, and edited files show up fine when I go back to the Win 7 laptop.

As an aside, some websites suggest removing the username that is a string of numbers, but I think if you still want to be able to access the EHD from a different computer (XP in my case) you need to keep it there to allow smooth access from both systems.

I hope that helps others out there who are going through the same frustrations!

Ruth

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Glad you got it worked out.

Thanks for posting back.

Joe

--Joe

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