Denied permission to access external USB Drive

Question

I've tried to recover a 14.5GB drive but I've run into some trouble. The drive is already formatted FAT32.

When inserting the drive when logged into my normal (Admin) user, I get an error saying i need to change permissions via the Security tab on disk Properties. The problem is, there's no disk tab on the drive (only General, Tools, Hardware, Sharing, Customize).

That being said, I am able to access the drive with no problems using the windows Administrator user. I also tried taking ownership via command prompt on the Administrator user, but I get the message: ERROR: File ownership cannot be applied on insecure file systems; there is no support for ACLs. This happens when using the comment on both users. I've tried using the icacls-command as well but with no luck.

Does anyone know what might be wrong here? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

FAT32 formatted drives do not support file permissions. The permissions for everything are determined by how the drive is mounted. The concepts of ownership and permissions are only to be found in later disk formats, but FAT32 has none.

Thus, no Security tab and no ownership.

The error message you are encountering is puzzling. You may add to your post a screenshot for us to have a look, or you may ignore it if the disk works correctly in spite of it.