Western Digital Passport: Access Denied on Second Computer

My friend Mike recently bought a nice black Western Digital Passport. It's a slick little portable harddrive the problem was it wasn't very portable. Sure he could carry it around, but if he plugged it into a computer other than his it was inaccessible; if you tried to open or explore it gave an "Access Denied" error.

WTF?

Well, it ended up being a fairly simple fix. He updated the permissions on the drive to include the "Everyone" group. For some reason when he first formatted it (NTFS) the only groups that had permission to the drive were his account, "SYSTEM", and "CREATOR OWNER" - but by adding "Everyone" it now works on other windows machines.

So if you're having a problem getting your Passport to work on multiple computers, put it back on the original machine and make sure "Everyone" has "Full Control" access to the drive.

Open "My Computer", right click and pick "Properties" in the context menu. Then select the "Security" tab. Once that is up, click the "Add" button, enter "Everyone" in the field provided, hit "Apply" then "OK".. and voila' you'll be good to go.