The good news: It almost always means Windows has lost permission to let your current account read the files.

This is the gold standard solution for permission errors. It manually tells Windows, "I am the new owner of this drive."

This is not a "drive not formatted" error. Do not format your drive when you see "Access Denied."

"Hard Disk Access Denied" is one of the most frustrating error messages a user can encounter. It implies that your data is still there, but the operating system (usually Windows) has lost the "keys" to open the door.