Removed access from external hard drive for administrator

I have accidentally removed the permission to access an external hard rive on my administrator account.

My hard drive is formatted using NTFS I think, and my operating system is Vista.

I was trying to allow other computers or accounts to gain access instead as when ever I plug it into another computer that does not have access either. Or when I create a normal account (I have not made another administrator account to see if that has access yet) neither does that.

I know that there is (well - was) a security tab in the hard drives properties that grants the permission but that is not visible to me. This is where I removed my permission since I thought that removing that would mean anyone has access like removing a restriction rather that removing a permission. Silly I know.

Can someone please help me?

Have you tried logging in as Administrator in Safe mode and seeing if you can change the permission?

problem of access denied is a common problem with files that you created from another installation of Windows.

This has to do with the security settings that Windows XP applied to
these files. Since they were created from your user account in XP,
they do not apply to your user account in Vista, and so you are denied
access in some circumstances.

To fix this, you can follow these steps:

- Click Start
- Type: cmd
- Right-click cmd when it appears
- Click Run As Administrator
- Change location to the folder you need access to (e.g. cd e:\folder)
- Type: takeown /F . /R /A /D Y > NUL
- Type: icacls . /grant USER: (OI)(CI)(F) /L /T /Q
(Where USER is your username - you will only have access from your
XP and Vista machine in this case)
(Or, replace USER with Users if you want anyone [on any computer
your hard drive is plugged into] to have full access to these files)

you can check here http://forums.techarena.in/vista-sec...tm#post2894226

I did try and change the permissions in safe mode however it does not show the hard drive :(

I did try and follow your advice timon, even though these files were not imported from XP (well some are however they all could open before I accidentally removed my permission) anyway. I am stuck on the instruction of 'change location' the cmd starts with 'C:Windows\system32' and I don't know how to change it to F: with is the hard drive I can't access.

EDIT: Ok ignore that - I realised my hard drive was not plugged in :/ I'm an idiot.
I typed in F:\ after the "C:Windows\system32>" and it replied access is denied.

Okay I realize that this thread has been dead about a year but considering this was the first thing to pop up in google when i searched for this problem, i'll add my two cents in quick since the thread seems to have been just left hanging.

First I'll confirm that the solution does in fact work. I've got several hdd's in my rig, one of which houses the OS (win7), the rest are for storage. I was playin' around, trying to get an understanding of file permissions and I managed to deny access to myself even as admin for one particular storage drive. What timon suggested worked like a charm (although in the icacls command, there should be no space between USER: and (OI))

Another note to mention is that somehow during the process of removing and then re-adding permissions, the recycle bin contents for that specific drive became corrupted. It showed me the error when I navigated to the properties window of that drive to verify if the operation was successful. Must have something to do with how permissions are handled for the recycle bin itself.