Read only hard disk stopping installation of Sims 3

[Deeney69]

Unable to instal the Sims 3 due to hard drive read only. 

After installing WIndows 10 my hard drive d (the one with the most space) is stuck on "read only". I have tried every solution I can find and still have no luck.

Has anyone come across a solution for this?

[roberta591]

@Deeney69   Does your Windows 10 login give you administrator rights or are you a user on someone else's computer?

Is Windows 10 a clean install or an upgrade? Does D drive show in disk management? Is D drive a new disk or an existing drive (in use before the Windows 10 install)? What was the computer before Windows 10. What version of Windows were you using to access D drive? What you are describing is unusual and may happen if you didn't take proper steps when installing (especially re installing) an operating system. Can you create a directory on the D drive? Can you create a simple txt file with notepad on D drive? What are you trying to do when you get the read only error? Are you trying to access data created by another user? First thought is you have a user rights issues.

[Deeney69]

In answer to your questions: My computer and I am the administrator. Windows is a clean instal. Drive D shows in disk management. Drive D is an existing drive. WIndows 2000 was before Windows 10. I can make a new folder on drive D but cannot save anything (docs, jpegs, games) on it. I have to save to C drive then cut and paste, hence lies the problem with the digital download. Because it doesn't download, instead  it installs it, it keeps saying drive D is read only. 

When I bring up the security I have access to everything but folders is Drive D all say "read only" even if you make a new one it immediately becomes read only.

[puzzlezaddict]

@Deeney69  You can try to change the security settings on D, as described in this post:

https://superuser.com/questions/955520/d-drive-is-read-only-after-windows-10-upgade

Be sure to make note of the changes you implement, in case you need to reverse some of them or retrace your steps.

[roberta591]

@Deeney69  Windows 2000 support ended July 13, 2010. ANYTHING on or before that date should have been updated. A lot has changed since 2010. Is this a SATA drive or a PATA drive. Looking at the drive in disk management, is the drive formatted FAT32? Windows 2000 (or NT 5.0) (NT means not there) used 3 different file systems - FAT exFAT and NTFS. I can't remember the rights structure for Win 2000 but a good guess is that it is different then Windows 10 and thus why you are locked out of writing. If you need data from the drive you can purchase a new drive and copy data (don't image the drive) from the old drive to the new drive and then re partition and format the old drive. There were so many changes going on when Windows 2000 and Windows XP were released that it is hard to say exactly why you are having this issue. About the time of Windows 2000, hard drives were getting bigger then the file system (FAT) could handle hence the reason for NTFS. NTFS also introduced a much tighter security system. Windows 2000 used NTFS 3.0 and Windows XP and Windows 10 use(d) NTFS 3.1. Also about this time Microsoft was going to change the file system to ReFS but that never happened. Windows 2000 came along after Windows no longer ran on top of DOS like Windows 95. Recently the bios needed a change to EUFI so computers can partition drives larger then 2T. Yes you could have partitioned a 4T drive into two partitions of 2T and that would work but with the old bios you could not have a 4T partition. Disk drive have become so cheap today. I just bought a WD blue label 1Tb 7200RPM drive for $39.99. It is cheaper to replace the drive then to spend hours trying to recover an old drive.

[Deeney69]

Thanks. I have decided to use a portable hard drive. It's loading the game. Just hope I don't have problems

[Deeney69]

Thanks

[roberta591]

@Deeney69  The problem with a usb hard drive is they may change drive designation depending on how your system mounts usb devices when it powers up. If this happens the game will not works properly (if at all) because it won't find the files were the game thinks they are. Usb storage is good for music, pictures, document files. Files like a movie file that has to be pointed to to play. Once this game write files to D: drive, the next time the game starts it is going to look for D: drive for that data. If you plug a thumb drive in the system may assign D: to the thumb drive and say E: to the portable drive. While a portable drive does "work" I don't recommend it to be a permanent solution.