'Access is denied' message when copying

Anyone who's masochistic enough to want to read the full back-story to this is welcome to indulge themselves by reading my first thread on this forum; however, that's left me with two problems which I'm posting separately.


I'm sure this is another 'easy when you know how' thing; but still: having just installed a new SSD as my primary C drive, I'm using what used to be my C drive ( a 1TB HDD ) as what is now my backup D drive. In fumbling my way through that process, I've had to do a handful of bits of work using the old C drive ( now the D drive ). I thought it would be a simple case of copying the files that had been worked on, from the D drive to the new C drive; however, although some of the files seem to have copied successfully, I'm getting a large amount of 'Target: access is denied' messages, which, as you'd expect, result in the files not being copied, which in turn means the new C drive still isn't fully operational.


Obviously I realise that the workaround is to continue to use the old C drive ( now the D drive ) for the time being; but that's cumbersome and obviously not a long-term solution. I usually use TeraCopy for all my copying and backups, and it's always copied the files from the working drive without a problem; however, this is the first time I can remember that I've had to copy files to the working primary drive, and it's really not having it. I've tried TeraCopy, I've tried drag-and-drop, I've tried copy-and-paste, and it's the same result each time. I don't know if it makes any difference, but far and away the majority of the files are pictures and music files, and a handful of documents.


I sense this might be something to do with 'administrator privileges' or 'permissions' or some-such ( that's nothing more than a vaguely-educated guess ), but since I'm the only one using the computer, I wouldn't have thought I'd need to get my own permission to do stuff!!!


As previously, any inspiration gratefully received.

Were exactly are you coping to its telling you you don't have permission to write to that folder if you are trying to copy software then the folders will be owned by system.

There were quite a lot of files involved all told, but from memory, most of them would have been going to the 'My Pictures' folder, some to the 'My Music' folder, and some to the 'My Documents' folder.


'Owned by system' sounds decidedly 1984ish! If I want to put stuff in those folders, particularly given that I'm the only one who ever uses this computer, surely that must be do-able ...?


P.S.: There was no software involved, in the sense that nothing I was trying to copy was software.

Unless I'm doing something wrong or I've misunderstood the instructions ( either of which is entirely possible ) that hasn't seemed to work, which is to say that the exact same files that were showing as 'access denied' the first time round, still are.


I've assumed that the 'top level of the data tree' would be the C drive as shown in 'My Computer'. I've gone to Properties>Security>Advanced; I assume the next thing you intended me to do was to click the 'Owner' tab? If so, there is no 'inherit' checkbox within that window ( or elsewhere that I can find ).


You say 'set the owner for the files to your new user'; there seems to be no way to do that without clicking 'edit', so I've done that; however, it still won't allow me to edit the 'current owner'.


By the by, I have no idea why it seems to have taken this position for certain files but not others!

Hello Nigel,


When you say 'fix' ...?