[whutitdew]

I removed an internal hard drive from a PC that i don't use anymore. The hard drive has Vista Business installed on it. I want to use it as an external 1tb drive now. So I dock the drive on my new Thermaltake BlacX Duet HDD docking station and my laptop recognizes the drive but I have no access to it. I do some web searches and find that I need to change the ownership of the drive. I tried to change it and all I get is the "access denied" error popping up.

Any workarounds to access the drive? Or even format the drive for external use?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[TheOutcaste]

How to Take Ownership of an object in Vista/Windows 7
See if one of those methods works. If not, report which method you try, and what error you get, and at what point you get an error.

You can format the drive by right clicking and clicking Format...
Or from Disk Management:
Click Start | Run (or press WinKey+R), type diskmgmt.msc, press Enter
Right click the partition and click Format...

[whutitdew]

Thanks TheOutcaste. But either one of those solutions worked. It goes as far as me trying to change the ownership and I get the "inaccessible" error over and over.

Strange thing is its a Seagate HDD. So I thought I'd try Hiren's Boot CD. So with that I was able to the Seagates Wizard tools to select the drive, wipe it, and label it. I showed on screen that it indeed wipe the drive and all. But once I let Windows 7 bootup and check My Computer it still recognized the drive as "inaccessible".

All I want to do is make this once drive using Vista Business as an external drive.

[TheOutcaste]

Whar does Disk Management show about the drive?
Click Start | Run (or press WinKey+R), type diskmgmt.msc, press Enter
Does it show the drive as Basic, Dynamic, Foreign, Offline, or something else?
Is it showing the partition as healthy, and show the correct file system that you formatted with (NTFS/FAT32)?

[whutitdew]

It doesn't list it in Disk Management at all. I only see the drive in My Computer as Local Disk Q:

[TheOutcaste]

If the drive doesn't appear in Disk Management, it won't appear in Computer. This means the drive or the dock is not being recognized.
Click Start, right click Computer, click Manage
Click Device Manager
Expand Disk Drives
The Seagate drive should be listed here by it's model number (ST31000DDDXX).
If not, Things to check:
check the connection to the dock
make sure the Dock power supply is connected and working
try the other slot
try a different drive
try it on a different PC
Are you connecting via USB or eSATA? If eSATA, you may need to reboot with he drive connected for it to be seen, your laptop might not support HotSwaping via eSATA

Do you have Office 2010 installed? Drive Q is a virtual drive used by Office 2010's Click-to-Run feature.