I got blocked out of my hard drive (Solved)

[Pluckier]

So, after fidgeting for a while I finally changed from Windows 10 to Mint, before erasing Windows I of course put all of my stuff into an external Hard Drive, problem is, now I can't access any of my image, .txt or word files because of "Permission Denied" how could I try and fix this, I'm brand new to this lmao.

Hello, I found out what happened, turns out I didn't get rid of the Bitlocker encryption before changing OS so I just lost the files, reminder for the future: If you're about to move, get your stuff out of the house before you toss away the key

[tuzzer]

It could be a permission issue.
Try to:
1. plug in your external drive
2. open a shell window (ctrl+alt+t)
3. identify your drive with df -h, you should see something like /media/username/drivename
4. type cd /media/username to move to that folder, then type ls -l, at this point you should see the drive name in a list, preceeded by "username username", if that is not you username, then that could be the problem.
5. change the owner of the folder to you user (to know your user name type whoami) with chown -R yourname:yourname /media/username/foldername
(-R means "recursive" so every file and folder inside the folder you're acting on will be affected)

At this point you should be able to read and copy you files to the internal hard drive using the Graphical Environment of your Mint installation

Hope this helps

[AndyMH]

What filesystem is on your external HDD, probably ntfs? Was fast boot enabled in windows? With fast boot enabled in win it never really shuts down and any filesystems it has accessed are locked = read-only to linux.