Access denied, files missing?

Hello,

I've been all over the internet looking for a solution to this, and none of them have worked so far.


I have a laptop hard drive in a USB enclosure; I'm running Windows 8 with Classic Shell on my current machine, I had 7 on the old laptop. I have no access to anything on it, and my computer doesn't seem to be able to actually detect anything there at all.


I have tried to change the owner of the folders/device and establish full control permissions on every user account I have, but I only get a ridiculous number of error messages: "An error occurred while applying security information to", and either "The system cannot find the file specified" or "Access is denied" or "Failed to enumerate objects in the container". I've followed several guides on this and the error appears as soon as I attempt to make any kind of changes; obviously, none of them have actually been successful.

The folders themselves appear to be empty, despite most of the space on the drive being used. There were no hidden files or folders.

I tried to use "attrib -h -r -s /s /d g:\*.*" but the results were similar: "Access denied", "system cannot find the file specified", "unable to change attribute".

I have no idea what I'm even doing anymore.