Access denied though I am the administrator. W530

[khary23]

last night I changed the account permissions of one of the authenticate users accounts , now I cannot make any changes from my account though it says that I am an administrator and should have full access. I really need help with this as my Masters research needs to be accessible to me.

[khary23]

Just noticed that the owner of C: had some how been changed to Authenticated Users. I tried to change it back to my account with the change function but get a cannot open access to control editor access denied a message.

[khary23]

Fixed it.

[MikalE]

I hope your Masters research isn't in computer science...

[JPOESQ]

Fixed it.

Since many people who peruse this forum might run into the same problem and not be as successful as you, perhaps you could share your fix.

[RealBlackStuff]

I found a way around most of these obstacles by "Taking Ownership" of HD contents.
Been using this for donkeys years!

You can either go the long, convoluted way around, using e.g. this: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-take ... windows-10

Or apply just this small mod to your Registry:

Code: Select all

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas]
@="Take Ownership"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F"
"IsolatedCommand"="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas]
@="Take Ownership"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" /r /d y && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F /t"
"IsolatedCommand"="cmd.exe /c takeown /f \"%1\" /r /d y && icacls \"%1\" /grant administrators:F /t"

Copy the above and paste it into a file: InstallTakeOwnership.reg in a safe place.
Right-click on that .reg file and select: Merge to add it to your registry.
From now on you can right-click on ANYthing you want and select Take Ownership!

[Shredder11]

Thanks for the reg file. Does this work in any version of Windows from say XP upwards?

[RealBlackStuff]

From my own experience it works perfect in XP, Vista, W7 and W8/W8.1
In all cases I am/was the Administrator, but I assume for a 'standard' user it'll work the same.
I don't have (or want) W10, so don't know that.

[dr_st]

You have to be careful with taking ownership, though. If you take ownership of too many system files that are used by special built-in accounts (e.g., System, TrustedInstaller), various things can break in unpredictable ways. Sometimes you'll only notice it much later.

[MikalE]

What causes things to break because of ownership?

[dr_st]

Without knowing Windows internals, I can just assume that the same way you can get "permission denied" because you are not the owner, then if you take ownership, and later a system account tries to do something with the file, it will too get a "permission denied", and things will not work as expected.

Not saying that sometimes it is not the correct solution (especially if we are talking about your files that somehow got the ownership assigned wrong), but it should not be used too frivolously on system files.

It happened to me once before with ownership change breaking some softlinks within AppData folder hierarchy - they would not get resolved correctly ending in infinite directory loops, or something along those lines.

[MikalE]

Thank you for the explanation. It makes perfect sense.