External USB Hard Drive (permissions?)

dazz williams · 12-24-2007, 01:34 PM

Have you ever had an external USB drive which had weird permissions or something?
I have one where I put a bunch of music on it (from computer A) and then computer B can't execute or move those files (ie: can't play the music off the external HDD and can't move the files onto computer B to play them directly).

This is my first external HDD for myself so excuse my n00bness. Any others that I've used on another computer I've used just like a USB flash drive/memory stick, dragging files back and forth.

Let me know if there's any other information you need. Operating system of comp A is WinXP Pro and comp B is WinXP MCE. The error message I get when trying to copy the files to comp B is
"Error Copying File or Folder: Cannot copy [file name]: Access is denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use."
When I try to play in winamp it just skips the songs (bc it can't access them).

Oh yeah, to make it more tricky it's not ALL the files on the external HDD that are like this. So far I've been able to execute or copy most everything except for MP3s, which are all in the MyMusic folder. I thought it may have something to do with messed up permissions since the MyMusic was under a different username on compA's MyDocuments, however pictures in MyPictures don't have this problem.

Anyway, ideas are most appreciated as always.

dazz.
PS - Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays!

downpour · 12-28-2007, 10:13 AM

What are the permissions on the mp3's? Are they different than the other files that will copy? Is there special software you had to install to use the external hdd, or does it just mount as a mass storage device? What make and model is the hdd? If I recall there's some models that have restrictions on filetypes because of copyright infringment.

Belisarius · 12-28-2007, 09:57 PM

Might be an odd permission issue, but last time I encountered that specific error message on an external HD, it was dying. I'd run a CHKDSK on it and see what happens.

dazz williams · 12-30-2007, 07:28 PM

Thanks for the responses guys. What I ended up doing was just formatting the ext. HDD (from computer A... I couldn't from comp B) and copying all the files on again but first creating a "music" folder to copy files into instead of copying the whole "MyMusic" folder. Don't know for sure if that helped the real issue at hand but I'm not having any problems so far...
dazz.