Quantcast
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 6058

Trying to get access to an old hard drive

My current computer runs Windows 7 64bit, and since the hard drive cables are SATA, I thought maybe I'd try to use some of the old hard drives I have lying around from various laptops and junk computers from over the years. At this point, none of the other computers exist anymore - just the hard drives.

Anyway, I hooked up an old laptop hard drive which I believe came from a machine running Vista 64-bit, and at first I wasn't even able to see it in the Windows explorer until I moved it to a different SATA slot on the motherboard. Now I can see it, but I can't do anything with it. The drive is designated as the Q drive, "Microsoft Office Click-To-Run 2010 (Protected)" and any attempt to format or change ownership to my administrative account on this computer is met with "Access Denied" or "You do not have permission" or some variation on those.

I'm aware that the MS click-to-run thing was a product of the virtual environment and is deliberately difficult to get rid of, but I already have MS Office installed on this machine, and I'd like to make use of the hard drive - as it stands, this ridiculous thing is holding about 150GB worth of storage space hostage, and I want it back.

So how do I get Windows to let me format that drive and use it how I want?

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 6058

Trending Articles