subfolders on external drive won't open

I'm only used to XP through 10. So I plugged in my external USB drive into my wife's Win 11 laptop and was able to open the top level of the drive and see the list of subfolders. But clicking a subfolders won't open it, it just makes a blue checkmark appear on it. Right click Open or Open in New Window does nothing either.

Tried double-click?

having been on double click since 1982 I can't imagine that wasn't my first and repeated move. I'll check when I can.

You will need at least READ permissions to see folders and files on a drive which has been written by another user.
Easiest way is to simply add her user to have the permissions she requires and then cascade the permissions down to the rest of the file tree

I assume that @Brink will have a suitable tutorial to give guidance

I agree with barman58 that you need to check permissions.

Beldar said:

it just makes a blue checkmark appear on it

Click to expand...

Coloured checkmarks on drives, folders or files generally indicates that a disk checking utility or backup utility has marked it for action of some kind.

I suggest you search here in ElevenForum & in TenForums for blue checkmark or similar.
Or get an image of the checkmark & search for it using Google's searching by image capability.

Best of luck,
Denis

---

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thank you. we will see what we can do.

barman58 said:

You will need at least READ permissions to see folders and files on a drive which has been written by another user.

Click to expand...

I have never had any problem opening folders and file by another user, I always get a warning box that I only have to click on continue then yes. As an example, when I tried opening my other user folder that I named Admin.

As for the check boxes, see this under View:

By the way, I recently had the problem of only being able to see the top-level folders and not being able to open them.
I had just had that disk in another computer to fix faults in its file system [the entire disk had become unreadable].
When i put it back in its normal computer, I had to work through changing ownership & permissions for each of the top-level folders I could see.
Afterwards, everything was hunky-dory.

All the best,
Denis

Here's a little guide with pictures that might help you change permissions.

Hi All, thanks.

I'm now guessing it's not permissions on her HP Win11 laptop.
1. we put the files she wanted from my Win10 on a thumb and they opened fine without any permissions tweaking
2. when I moved the external 1TB USB external back to my W10 tower and plugged it in, the pc started beeping and then threw an alert that the latest USB wasn't working right

This leads me to guess it wasn't working right on her laptop either.

BTW I could only stop that beeping by pulling the drive, powering the tower down, then back up, then plugging in the drive. Who knows?

EDIT: Sorry, Berton, just noticed that you already explained this. I missed it for some reason


The blue checkboxes are an option in File Explorer.

If you see this:



or this:



it simply means that you have this option turned on: