D:/ is not accessible. Access is denied.

Following recovery from recent hacking of my Dell laptop I removed 2 User accounts that I did not 'recognise'
I realise this was a big mistake now as I have lost access to the above drive.
Please can you help me to regain access and full control?

Simply removing Users shouldn't prevent access to the hardware unless one of those was the only one with Administrative rights. Also, is/was D:\ an actual drive or a partition on the only drive in the case? It's not shown in your My Computer listing.

Hi James, and thanks for your reply.

My D drive is my second (physical) drive that I installed about 2 years ago.

After I regained access to my laptop using Windows Update/Advanced Options/Recovery/Fix Problems using Windows Update (using Windows Insider repair), I have been chasing down residual issues (sfc /scannow not completing. dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth also not completing).
This is a secondary issue however as my D drive is now my priority.

Kind regards,

Paul

Hi OAT,
I will try this in a bit.
Thanks for you post.
Paul.

Pignatious said:

Following recovery from recent hacking of my Dell laptop

Click to expand...

Do you want to take the chance that this OS is safe to use?
You now have trouble using simple tools. I would suggest a clean install
to make sure nothing is left from the hack.

OAT said:

Add Change Owner to Context Menu in Windows 11 Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to add Change Owner to the context menu of all files, folders, and drives for all users in Windows 10 and Windows 11. An owner is assigned to an object when that object is created. By default, the owner is the creator of the object. No matter what permissions are...

www.elevenforum.com

Add "Reset Permissions" to Context Menu in Windows 11 Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to add or remove the "Reset Permissions" context menu to reset effective permissions of files and folders back to their default inherited permissions in Windows 10 and Windows 11. On NTFS and ReFS volumes, you can set security permissions on files and folders...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

I ran 'lusrmgr.msc' as per 1st option above.
Following the instructions I tried adding 'Administrator' to my group, even though it appeared that the group already contained Administrator, amongst others.

Trying again, I took a look at 'Administrator' ...

and noticed the following ...


Account disabled

???

Try this in cmd As Admin to see if you can access the hidden admin

net user Administrator /active:yes

hit enter.

Flashorn said:

Try this in cmd As Admin to see if you can access the hidden admin

net user Administrator /active:yes

hit enter.

Click to expand...

Update to earlier info I posted...

(sfc /scannow not completing. dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth also not completing)

I had tried these several times over the last few weeks (after much poking at my laptop with ignorance!).
At last, they have just completed successfully. I don't know if my 2nd Windows Insider repair install did the job, or my removal of the 2 accounts that prompted this thread?

However I ran your suggestion after the sfc /scannow completed .... see below

Please open the Command Prompt with admin privileges and execute the below command.

Pignatious said:

I removed 2 User accounts that I did not 'recognise'

Click to expand...

What were their usernames?

And do note that
- Administrators is a group of users
- Administrator is the username of the Built-in Admin account

You seem to have been trying to alter the Permissions of that Built-in Administrator account. I wonder what you intended to do because what you did does not seem to be related to your situation.


Denis