Windows 7 - Changing file permissions 'ungenuined' my win 7

I bought a new computer last October or November from HP with Windows 7 Pro loaded on it. I have had no problems with it. I recently let my friend borrow my external hard drive to transfer some files and, as I expected, when I got it back I had to reset the file permissions. Rather than doing it one file at a time I used ICACLS in the command prompt to batch change file permissions. Apparently doing so screwed up my update and backup settings because now Windows says that my copy is not genuine. Something to do with Windows update. I tried to change the group policy security settings but it wont let me change anything. I only used ICACLS to change the file permissions on one folder on my external hard drive. It backs up to that hard drive but on an entirely different parallel folder. Any ideas? I cant use the recovery because I get the error

"A Volume Shadow Copy Service Component encountered an unexpected error. Check the Application event log for more information (0x80042302)"

I cant even figure out where the "event log" is to check it. Thanks

Welcome to the forum,

Do you have a restore you can go back to before this happened?

If you type event viewer in start menu search you'll find the log you're looking for.

thanks for the reply.
As far as the restore, thats what brings up the error message. I guess I somehow changed the permission for the saved restore point files. I tried the event viewer and cant find anything wrong or at least no logged errors but I could be looking at the wrong log file. I looked at the recovery file.

I found some errors in the event log. These say event 7000:
"The Software Protection service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the path specified."

"The Volume Shadow Copy service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the path specified."

These say event 7001:
"The Extensible Authentication Protocol service depends on the CNG Key Isolation service which failed to start because of the following error:
The system cannot find the path specified."

"The WLAN AutoConfig service depends on the Extensible Authentication Protocol service which failed to start because of the following error:
The dependency service or group failed to start."

This one says event 10005
"DCOM got error "3" attempting to start the service VSS with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{E579AB5F-1CC4-44B4-BED9-DE0991FF0623}"

Does this clear anything up?

1) Make sure that the “Volume Shadow Copy”, “COM+ System Application”, and the “Distributed Transaction Coordinator” services are running.

2) Try running system restore in safe mode.

Edit: You need to make sure that all the services mentioned in the event log as well as the services on which they depend are set to AUTOMATIC startup type and are actually running.

In task manager the status of VSS, MSDTC, and ComSysApp are all stopped. Since they show up on the list does that mean its running or do I need to restart them somehow?
Ill try to restore in safe mode if I dont.

If it says stopped, they are not running.

Type services.msc in start search box . Scroll to the services in question , rt click>properties and set startup type to Automatic. Start the service.

ok that started the ComSysApp but the other two gave me an error message
Error 3: The system cannot find the path specified.
This error message seems to keep coming up. Is it possible when I changed the permissions it somehow changed the filepath for these services? I have the only account on this computer but if it was setup as \administrator (etc) instead of \aaron (the user account I gave the permissions to), could that be the problem? If so how do I repair the filepath?

It's a bit drastic, and it's not clear to me exactly what you did , but you could try resetting security to default.

ok, what are the implications of this and how do i do it?