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View Full Version : File Permissions in Vista -> Win7 Upgrade


Digital Parasite
10-06-2009, 12:18 PM
A few weeks ago I installed Win 7 on my system. I have an OS partition and a Data partition so I nuked the OS partition and installed Win 7 from scratch.

All of the NTFS folders on my Data drive however still have the user ID from my now dead Vista install. Is there an easy way to get my permissions spread everywhere on the data drive? For some reason some directories are inheriting stuff while others are not.

So I have a number of folders that I don't have permission to read. If I try to enter the folder in Win7 it asks me if I want permanent access, I say yes and it resets the permissions for that folder but a lot of the files in that folder are not set. Is there any way to mass set the permissions on files and folders so that it all gets fixed? So far I haven't found an easy way to force it to set the permissions for all files, sub-folders, sub-folder-files, etc...

Thanks,
Jeff
Bok
10-06-2009, 12:41 PM
I had the same problem, it's a major PITA..everything I tried did not work until I installed this.. works wonders :)

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-take-ownership-to-explorer-right-click-menu-in-vista/

Bok
Digital Parasite
10-06-2009, 12:51 PM
I had the same problem, it's a major PITA..everything I tried did not work until I installed this.. works wonders :)

Thank you!!!! That will save me a huge amount of time I think. Hopefully it works if you multi-select items as well.

Jeff.
the-mk
10-06-2009, 02:50 PM
the command line guys might like the "cacls" tool, details see "cacls /?" :D
but I don't know if it still exists in Vista and Windows 7... works fine with XP and Windows 2003 :thumbs:
Digital Parasite
10-07-2009, 07:16 PM
Ok guys, thanks for your help. I found two utils that are useful based on hints you gave.

In Windows 7, the cacls program exists but it is deprecated and replaced with icacls. So to give yourself full permissions on files you would use:

icacls filename.exe /grant Username:F

In the the icacls help I also saw reference to takeown which is a utility to take ownership of files. So with that is looks like you can do something like:

takeown /F file* /R

Filename, directory name or wildcards, and /R for recursive. So essentially I went to the root of my D drive with a "Run as Admin" command prompt, and did takeown /F * /R so it reset the ownership of every file on the HD to my new account. Fast and sweet.