Error: Drive is not accessible. Access is denied.

I was doing some backups from my PC to an external USB Drive (G) and all was going smoothly.

Then I went to manually copy some new files to the USB Drive and suddenly got the error :

G:/ is not accessible. Access is denied.

This happened once before several weeks ago and all it took was a reboot to get it working again. Rebooting didn't work this time. I can see the drive in This PC and open the properties for the drive, but when trying to run the disk scan tool I get:

The disk check can't be performed because Windows can't access the disk.

I can also access the security tab, but I'm not able to make any changes due to an error saying "You do not have permission to view or edit this object's permission settings."

All info I found online suggests fixing the permission settings, but of course I'm unable to do that. I'm stumped. Now, the drive is 13 years old but it hasn't been used that often, just a couple times a month to do backups. It's not used for anything else. There is 13 years worth of files on this drive and I really hope this can be resolved 🤞 .

Advice?

Sounds to me like the drive has gone bad. I had my USB drive go bad earlier this year and got the same messages. Here are the various steps I took to be sure it has failed.
Unplug the drive from the computer. Shut down the computer and reboot. Once it is fully booted then plug in the drive and see if it can be accessed.
Try a different cable, cables do go bad.
Finally I followed the instructions on this link to test the drive;

https://www.howtogeek.com/134735/how...rive-is-dying/

I found that my drive had indeed failed and I lost family pictures going back to my great-grandparents, thankfully I did have them also saved on DVD's. I have since also uploaded them to the cloud. Not taking any chances again.
This drive was 4 years sold, so age is immaterial, though 13 years is a very long time. Hope this isn't your only backup. More than two backups should be a rule of thumb for sure.

Thanks for jumping in.

I tried all the steps at the link you posted. Each method reported the internal disks (3) as OK, but the external drive was not acknowledged as being present in any of the methods.

I then tried the disk on my laptop (different machine)—and it worked perfectly. I took the opportunity while I had access to run a disk check and it came up okay. Took the drive back down to my PC (the one having the issue) and tried a different USB slot with both the original cable and a spare one. Wouldn't open, got the error message. So it does seem now that it's my PC, not the USB drive. Yay.

I know the USB slots on my PC are good because they work with other devices. So the goal now is to figure out why my PC won't read the drive.

Something just occurred to me. When I booted the drive up this morning, it came up as drive "F". I had assigned it letter G years ago and it's always come up as G, so that was kinda strange it came up as F this time. But I didn't think anything of it and reset it back to G. I'm pretty sure now shortly after changing the letter back is when I started having this issue.

Last week I plugged in an old thumb drive I hadn't opened in a while to see what was on it. I noticed the drive came up as drive "G", which is the letter I'd assigned to the other USB drive in question (the drive wasn't on at the time). Again, didn't think anything of it.

Now that I'm having this problem I'm starting to think something got screwed up with the drive letter assignments. I tried putting the USB drive back to F (what it open as this morning) and changing the thumb drive to an unused letter (K). Didn't help. (The thumb drive is working fine.)

So it's drive letter corruption maybe? Is that a thing?

Fixed it.

I went into Disk Manager, removed drive letter (G) from the external drive, rebooted. Then I reassigned G to the drive and it opened right away, all files intact. * whew *

Not sure how the letter assignments got screwed up in the first place, but if it happens again I'll know what to do. Hope this helps anyone else who might run across this problem. It's scary thinking a drive full of files got toasted.

Glad you got it to open...But...you really need to put these important documents someplace else too. If/when this happens again and you don't have an additional backup with all of those documents on that additional backup, then all will be lost. You said yourself, this drive is 13 Years old. I am betting it is on "borrowed" time.

I do store a ton of smaller, more manageable files in cloud storage. The files on the external drives are all larger files (video and other multimedia project files) and because of their large size would take forever to upload (internet is spotty in our area). The price of hard drives has come down quite a bit and they're a lot larger now, I'll probably get a couple. I'd like to look into those new "diskless" drives. I heard both good things and bad things about them.

Thanks for helping me out, I appreciate it.

You're welcome. Just please get yourself some other drives. You are right, they are not expensive today. Plus, if you think about it, how much will it "cost" if you do lose these files. I don't know what they are and I am not talking monetary cost, though that may be something to consider, but just the lost of personal files may be more than you want to risk.