Unable to change permissions on hard drive

[banGerprawN]

I recently upgraded all of my hard drives in my PC, and sold all of the old except one, which contained important information. I put this hard drive back in my PC, and tried to take ownership of the drive, only to find that I am unable to edit the permissions or view the current owner, thus preventing me from accessing any of the files on the hard drive.. I am logged on as Administrator. What could the problem be?

 

[ktwebb]

Partition NTFS? You shouldn't be denied taking ownership of the folder. What steps are you taking to do so?

Security tab of the folder, then advanced, owner tab. Your local administrator account should be listed. Check the radio button marked "Replace owner on subcontainer and objects"

 

[banGerprawN]

Partition NTFS? You shouldn't be denied taking ownership of the folder. What steps are you taking to do so?

Yep, partition is NTFS. Following these steps -

Security tab of the folder, then advanced, owner tab. Your local administrator account should be listed. Check the radio button marked "Replace owner on subcontainer and objects"

Problem is, the option to take ownership of child objects isn't visible (so I'm assuming it's not available), and selecting the ownership and clicking "Apply" or "OK" doesn't change anything. There is no current owner listed in the respective field either.

 

[Malk-a-mite]

There is a program called takeown that I used in the past, CLI tool that's part of 2000/3 resource kit. Should be able to find it with a google search.

 

[-(Xyphox)-]

Yep, partition is NTFS. Following these steps -

Problem is, the option to take ownership of child objects isn't visible (so I'm assuming it's not available), and selecting the ownership and clicking "Apply" or "OK" doesn't change anything. There is no current owner listed in the respective field either.

Did you turn off Simple File Sharing First?

 

[banGerprawN]

Did you turn off Simple File Sharing First?

You can't access ownership properties at all when using simple file sharing, so the answer is yes.

 

[-(Xyphox)-]

You can't access ownership properties at all when using simple file sharing, so the answer is yes.

yeah was just making sure

 

[banGerprawN]

There is a program called takeown that I used in the past, CLI tool that's part of 2000/3 resource kit. Should be able to find it with a google search.

TakeOwn: TakeOwn is a command-line tool that cleans up multiple boot drives without formatting the drive. Using this tool, you can delete an installation of Window 2000 from a local computer.

So TakeOwn doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for, according to this info.

Edit : Seems that I just need to be able to reset the SIDs on the drive to default (should be Administrators), and work from there. Anyway to do this?
Another idea was to boot a Live Linux CD and see if it ignores the security descriptors, and just copy all of the info to a FAT32 partition, which would completely delete any permissions attached to the files. Feasible?

 

[Malk-a-mite]

So TakeOwn doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for, according to this info.

Might be a different program - the TakeOwn that I was referring to was directly used to change ownership permissions to the Admin account on the machine.

*Edit - nope same program... but only half the description.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;269269
"The TakeOwn utility is a command-line utility that you can use to clean up multiple boot drives without formatting the drive. You can use TakeOwn in the following ways:
• To enable administrators to take ownership of shares in cases where the administrator account has been explicitly denied access. After administrators take ownership of the shares or drives, they can run the Cacls utility (Cacls.exe).
• To correct or repair permissions that have been misconfigured or tampered with."

 

[banGerprawN]

Might be a different program - the TakeOwn that I was referring to was directly used to change ownership permissions to the Admin account on the machine.

*Edit - nope same program... but only half the description.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;269269
"The TakeOwn utility is a command-line utility that you can use to clean up multiple boot drives without formatting the drive. You can use TakeOwn in the following ways:
• To enable administrators to take ownership of shares in cases where the administrator account has been explicitly denied access. After administrators take ownership of the shares or drives, they can run the Cacls utility (Cacls.exe).
• To correct or repair permissions that have been misconfigured or tampered with."

Perfect! Worked flawlessly.