Moved previous OS drive to new PC for storage, now everything is read only? + more crazy crap

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Enhanced Interrogator

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 23, 2013
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So first, I'll be talking about three PC's, I'll call them New PC, Old PC, Oldest PC.

I just built new PC with SSD, installed Windows 10. Take drive from Old and Older PC's, since they have my Steam and other games on them, and put them in my new PC. I open them up, and most folders (including Program files) in both drives are read only. Steam can't do anything with them.

This is weird because last year when I moved Older PC's drive into Old PC, it worked fine. Added my old steam folder, it read everything played everything. But now, moving Older PC drive and Old PC drive into New PC, both have their Program Files locked out. Went into properties, tried to untick read-only, and it seemed to go through with it, giving "access denied" on a couple files. But when I go to check properites again, Program Files is still read-only! Tried to change permissions with some stuff, then canceled out (then got a nasty error message saying I could really screw stuff up, something about files existing in incompatible states or something).

So I put Old PC's drive back into Old PC, and then everything started popping up "Access Denied" even the text files I have on my desktop! So I freaked and restarted Old PC, and it did a drive repair even though I didn't tell it to. Now I can open stuff on my desktop, but nothing on my taskbar works, and I can't open the start menu (or the right click start menu).

I mean... WTF

Can anybody give me any advice on how to move forward? I guess the easiest thing will be to just format those drives and redownload everything. But that's like a terabyte and a half of data!
 
Did you try to take ownership of the folders?
Also, elaborate on this: "Tried to change permissions with some ???stuff???, then canceled out (then got a nasty error message saying I could really screw stuff up, something about files existing in incompatible states or something)."
 
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Haha, not sure what I meant by "some stuff", I was angry/very tired when I wrote that. I did try to switch permissions for the Program Files folder to Full Control for Administrator, but it kept throwing out errors for certain files so I cancelled the operation, then it gave me a warning that I shouldn't cancel the operation for some reason that sounded serious, but I was tired so I went through with it. Not sure if changing permissions is the same thing as taking ownership.

So today I've gone back to the drawing board and decided to just open the drive via Ubuntu Live CD and delete the Windows Folder and all the other stuff I'm not going to use any more, basically just keeping media, documents, and games. And I'll move everthing out of Program Files, hopefully making the files/folders writeable again.

But now a new issue has come up, and Old PC isn't POSTing anymore, or at. It's HP business PC with UEFI and all that, it stopped posting after the Windows difficulties mentioned above
 
EnhancedInterrogator said:
Yeah, my problem goes way beyond that. I can't even move files around on the drive since they're write protected
Click to expand...

If they're write protected you still should be able to drag the Steam folder off the drive onto another one while you sort the faulting drive out?
 
I had this happen to me also in the past. Mine was my sound file drive .I moved the drive several times, bottem line was the drive was bad and corrupted the files.
I used some program that went and changed permissions back but not on all files, so ended up losing quite a few. Salvage what up can a get a new drive.
 
Well, I think I've found the solution for the most part. Changing permissions and ownership for drives/folders is a pretty convoluted process and I shouldn't have tried to improvise through the submenus.

I just finished following this guide (some options are in slightly different places in Win 10):

http://www.preyerplanning.com/take-ownership-of-entire-hard-drive-in-windows-7.pdf

Which I found in this thread (also has some helpful tips):

Removing Redundant OS From Secondary Drive? - Steam Users' Forums

So this allowed me to delete my old Windows folder, which opened up space for me to move stuff around. Same process should work for program files though I haven't messed with it yet.

Thanks for your help guys.

On a side note, now it looks like Old PC might be dead, looks like the memory controller isn't working anymore. Not sure if me screwing up its system files last night, then running it, could have anything to do with it. Or just me turning it on and off a lot last night with 3 hard drives hooked up. Sucks because I factored selling that into cushioning the blow from building New PC.
 
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