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Files on external drive cannot be accessed (owner + permissions hell!)
Hi there,
I know similar issues have somehow been addressed elsewhere, but it seems my particular problem hasn't quite been faced by many others, so here we go:
I have thousands of files on an external drive. My computer recently crashed, so I had to fresh-install windows 7 (ultimate x64). While some files on the extenal hdd work fine, others won't work given that the owner and permissions are screwed. I can manually right-click any file and go to the properties>security tab and then add "Everyone" or my new user and then add full control and that's it, the file works fine.
BUT I can't be doing this manually for thousands of files!
So I've researched a bit and have installed the registry hack for "Take ownership" on right-clicking a file/folder (Add "Take Ownership" to Explorer Right-Click Menu in Win 7 or Vista - How-To Geek), I've ran a bunch of commands from an admin-level command prompt (icacls, takeown, grant, etc., as per here: Tools to Manage Access Control Lists - Tutorials,Articles,Algorithms,Tips,Examples about Security, Solved changing permissions on multiple files - Vista Forums).
All I now see is some weird user on most files, but no permissions set for me to access them (user is something like S-1-5-123445678890...). And so nothing seems to have been solved. I still have to manually right-click a file and use the security tab to add a new user, set permissions, etc.
How come it works through the gui and not on the command line? My hope is to do it for a whole folder (E:\music) which has literally hundreds and hundreds of folders and mp3 files. It would suck if I'm stuck doing it manually!
Thanks in advance for your help, if any!