Windows 7: How to assign access rights to subfolders

I am having trouble assigning rights to folder and subfolders, even with an Admin account. It seems I have to go to every subfolder and every file to be able to change the rights. (It's a USB thumdrive and I used a laptop to assign all rights to that laptop account).

There must be an easy and non-time consuming way to do this.

Thanks.

NTFS permissions should always automatically cascade down the folder tree - unfortunately this does not always happen.

USB thumb drives are notorious for this as they are likely to contain files Owned by, and hold permissions for, many different user IDs, from multiple systems.

In order to reset the drive to the current system they are attached to what I have done in the past is ....

• Take ownership of the root of the drive.
• Remove all existing permissions on the root folder.
• Set the new required permissions on the root folder.
• Manually propagate the permissions to the rest of the folder tree.

The facilities for this are found on the advanced tab in the security /permissions tab.

Unfortunately sometimes even this method will fail on some especially complex permissions sets and these may need to be treated as separate sub trees

How do you manually propogate down. When I apply the change, I get Access denied messages for some of the subfolders; others it does not even see.

In the advanced security screen you should see something similar to this example ....



Although with the root folder you should not see the inherit checkbox checked.

The user ID Account unknown is an example of a remnant from another OS

The highlighted option should force propagation but, as mentioned, can fail unless full ownership is set, for the complete tree, for the user attempting to apply permissions.

Where permissions are "very confused" the manual propagation of the ownership may need to be applied to sub folders before permissions may be applied.