It is one of the most reliably alarming moments in home computing. You have replaced an ageing desktop, pulled the old hard drive out, slotted it into a USB caddy, and plugged it into the new machine expecting to drag your photos across. Windows shows you the drive, shows you the folders, and then throws up a box that reads “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder.” If you have just hit Access Denied on an old hard drive in Liberton, Newington or anywhere else in south Edinburgh, the important thing to know first is this: that message is about permissions, not about your data. The files are still there.
What follows is what the message actually means, the parts of the standard advice we agree with, and the one step we do differently on the bench — because doing it in the wrong order is how a recoverable drive becomes an unrecoverable one.
Why Windows Locks You Out of Your Own Files
Every folder on an NTFS drive carries a list of who is allowed to open it. That list does not store your name. It stores a Security Identifier — a long unique number, generated when the user account was created, that belongs to that account on that installation of Windows.
When you install Windows on a new machine and create an account with exactly the same name, the same email address and the same password, Windows generates a completely new Security Identifier. As far as the old drive is concerned, you are a stranger. The user profile folder was locked to a number that no longer exists on this computer, so access is refused.
This is also why the rest of the drive usually opens perfectly. Anything you stored outside the user profile — a folder off the root of the drive, a second partition, a games directory — typically inherits permissions that allow everyone, and opens without a murmur. It is specifically the Users folder that stops you, and that is where the documents, desktop and photos live.
The Standard Fix, and Why We Do Not Start There
Search this problem and every guide gives you the same answer: right-click the folder, Properties, Security, Advanced, change the Owner to your current account, tick “Replace all child object permission entries”, hit Apply, wait. It is the correct fix, and on a healthy drive it works.
Here is the part those guides leave out. Taking ownership recursively is not a read operation. It walks every folder and file on that drive and writes a new permission entry to each one. On a profile with a couple of hundred thousand files, that is a couple of hundred thousand small writes to a drive whose health nobody has checked yet.
If that drive is the reason the old PC was replaced — and in our experience it very often is — you have just asked a failing mechanical drive to perform the most write-intensive task you could have picked, before you copied a single photo off it. We have seen ownership changes stall around the ninety per cent mark on a drive with pending reallocated sectors and never come back, taking the file table with them.
So the bench rule is simple and it never changes: read the drive’s SMART data first, copy the data off second, change permissions last, or not at all. A drive with reallocated or pending sectors goes straight to imaging and never gets written to.
A Real Liberton Example
A customer near Liberton Brae brought in a caddy and an old drive from a tower that had been getting slower for the better part of a year. They had followed a video guide, started the ownership change, and it had been sitting at the same progress point for most of an afternoon.
The drive had a long list of pending sectors and an audible retry pattern on one region of the platter. We stopped the ownership process, imaged the drive block by block to a healthy disk, and then took ownership of the folders on the copy — where a stalled write matters not at all. Every photo came back. Had that ownership change been left running overnight on the original, the outcome would have been a very different conversation.
That is the entire difference between the internet answer and the workshop answer: not the technique, but the order.
When Taking Ownership Will Not Help At All
There are three situations where no amount of permission-changing gets you in, and recognising them early saves a lot of wasted evenings.
The drive is BitLocker encrypted
If the folder icons show a padlock, or Windows asks for a recovery key rather than refusing on permissions, the drive is encrypted and the contents are mathematically inaccessible without that key. Plenty of people have this switched on without ever knowing, particularly on machines that shipped with a Microsoft account already signed in. Our guide to BitLocker drive encryption and recovery keys covers where to find yours.
The account was a work or school account
If the old PC was joined to a company domain or an Entra ID tenant, the profile permissions point at an identity managed elsewhere. You can still take ownership as a local administrator, but if the organisation also applied Encrypting File System or device encryption, the files themselves may need the original certificate.
The filesystem is damaged, not locked
An Access Denied that appears intermittently, or alongside the drive disappearing and reappearing in Explorer, is often not a permissions problem at all — it is a failing drive presenting a corrupt file table. This is the case where continuing to poke at it does real damage, and where our data recovery service takes over.
Doing It Safely Yourself
If the drive is healthy and you want to proceed on your own, the sane order is: listen to it and check its SMART status, copy anything irreplaceable to a second location first if it is already readable, then take ownership of one folder at a time rather than the whole drive at once. Start with Documents or Pictures. If it completes quickly, carry on. If it crawls, stop.
Our full hard drive data recovery guide goes deeper into reading drive health, and if the old machine is being replaced rather than repaired, our walkthrough on transferring files from an old PC to a new one covers the tidier route that avoids caddies entirely.
Where We Come In
We deal with this exact scenario most weeks, usually as part of a wider upgrade job. If you would rather not gamble on a drive you already suspect, we can read it in the workshop, recover the profile properly, and hand it back on media you can plug straight into the new machine — often on the same visit under our same-day computer repair in Liberton, and as a standard Liberton data recovery job when the drive needs longer on the bench. We cover Liberton, Newington, Craigmillar and Morningside for collection, and the wider Edinburgh area for workshop drop-offs.
If the old machine is being retired entirely, we can also set the new one up via our operating system installation service, repair the original if it is worth saving through laptop repairs, and dispose of the old hardware securely through IT recycling and e-waste disposal once you have confirmed everything you need is off it.
The headline, though, is worth repeating, because it is the thing people most need to hear when that box appears on screen: Access Denied is Windows being cautious about who you are. It is not Windows telling you the files have gone.
Last updated: 19 August 2026