ADN

I'll have to wait till I can use the Vista laptop again but I've run the disk check on my XP PC yesterday and no errors came up or anything. You think the Vista disk check could show something different?

No, I don't think so....But I mean to run the disk check on the external drive in Vista, not check the disk of the XP machine...

Well, it took a while but I've finally gotten ahold of a Vista laptop.
I've done the disk check on all three partitions from both the Vista laptop and the XP comp and they went smoothly - no errors whatsoever.

Although there are no problem accessing the HD on the Vista laptop, I'm still denied access on my XP desktop.

Any thoughts on the next step to try to figure out the problem?

Nope. It's always been NTFS. But I JUST found out that the PS3 only recognizes FAT32. As I said before, I just turned off the HD while the PS3 was on because the PS3 didn't recognize it and I thought it would've been safe. It was only after that that the "Access Denied" problem started occuring.

I'm guessing there's no solution to this?
If you guys got any other possible solutions or troubleshooting, I'm willing to try them (as long as I don't lose my files).

My guess is that if you want to use the drive on the XP machine, you need to set the owner of the drive in XP to whatever your username is there...The only problem that I had that remotely resembled that was fixed that way...I copied a folder to an external, but when I tried to open it on another machine, it gave me the error that I didn't have permission...I set ownership to the folder by using the properties menu, and that fixed it...I wouldn't doubt that there was something similar going on here, as the symptoms are the same...

Alright I'll try that, since right now the drives are all set to "Allow Everyone" as far as ownership goes. The only difference from my problem and what you had is that instead of just individual folders within drives denying me access it's the entire drive or partition of my HDD.

I've got a question though: when you had that problem with having denied access to those folders, were you able to open it or access it by going through the 'folders tree' or by browsing for it? I mean before you changed it's ownership status?

Before I changed ownership, I could not do anything to it...Usually, perms are not carried over from one media to the next to prevent this, but sometimes I guess the ghost in the machine has its way...I lost 4 GB of crucial data because of a lost private key once, simply because I thought that by burning the data to disc it would remove the ownership...Instead, I was left with a shitload of encrypted files...

If the drive works on the machine running Vista, and not on the machine running XP, I have little doubt that the problem is definitely stemming from that or something similar...