Permissions Fiasco

Pyprohly said:

So you don’t get the “Can’t open access control editor. Access is denied.” error here?

If the problem is contained at C:\, you can just browse the file system using the address bar and copy your data off the drive.

I imagine your personal files would be under C:\Users. Can you access this location?

I can access C:\Users however it must be reverting to something else because even though it shows access all of the directories shown look like the admin one

Have tried several times to find *.jpg, *.doc, *.txt, et al via computer and they are accessible everywhere but C:. Shit!

fotog673 said:

I can access C:\Users however it must be reverting to something else because even though it shows access all of the directories shown look like the admin one

Could you clarify this?


If nothing’s holding you back you can start moving data off the drive now. After you've verified you have everything safe, clean install.

Clean Install Windows 7

Pyprohly said:

Could you clarify this?


If nothing’s holding you back you can start moving data off the drive now. After you've verified you have everything safe, clean install.

Clean Install Windows 7

Sorry getting a bit goofy. This is what I see when I go to C:\Users. You see four Admins and a bunch of others but when you open them they are nearly all the same. I still can not see any specific files such as *.jpg, doc, txt, PSD, PDF etc. It is like they are all references with no access.

Pyprohly said:

Could you clarify this?


If nothing’s holding you back you can start moving data off the drive now. After you've verified you have everything safe, clean install.

Clean Install Windows 7

I wonder if I cleaned the internal 600gb drive, clean installed win7 on it if it would make the other install win old or something and then I might have access

Callender said:

I don't know if this actually works but see if you can grab your files and move them to an external drive:

Emergency Kit - save your files from a dead OS

Personally I use Aomei PE Builder bootable USB to recover files but I'm reading that Windows Updates has broken the current version so if you download it - it won't work.

Headed to another computer. Will try to dl WinDirStat, some others and will look for this. Suggestions have been made to try an Ubuntu flash boot. Know anything about that?
Also if I were to do a fresh install on a second internal drive, would windows save the original install to like Win.old or something and would I then have access to that? Tried icalcs but was denied. Thanks most awesomely for all your help whatever happens. Lar

Do you suppose if I deleted the Lar profile somehow that would just leave the admin permissions? I think what happened is I was operating from within the admin profile and screwed up permissions from there. Just stupidly forgot. In looking at the data from within CCCleaner windows/system seems to be there. Though nothing that is in any of the other directories. Still blocked. Finally was able to run WinDarStat and again shows the system but I think the other problem is there are two partitions. One is system the other is C:. If you have given up in disgust I totally understand.

Hey, hey, hey. I was able to replicate the exact problem! And when I have problems they don’t last long.

I’ve removed all access permissions from C drive plenty, plenty of times and yet I never had the “Can’t open access control editor. Access is denied.” issue happen to me. This is because, although I had messed with the root directory’s permissions many times over, never once had I dared shut down my machine with these toxic changes in place. Namely, you can replicate this error by removing all permissions from C drive then rebooting. Why this error happens in the first place is simply a bug with Windows Explorer. Windows Explorer is especially bad when it comes to permissions. What I noticed is, if your account is prevented access to C drive, Explorer will be prevented from writing to all locations, even if the location you are writing to has full access. This makes this issue all the more scarier for the average user, I’m sure.

Now, the reason why my permission fixing script didn’t work was simply due to a PowerShell backwards compatibility shortcoming. And I’m kicking myself because I actually had this bug resolved and then I removed it. You see, I had written this section of code back when I was on Windows 8.1 then had revisited it months later when I moved to Windows 10, and so, when I looked at the code section I didn’t know what it did and decided to remove it for optimisation reasons I won’t be making that mistake again.


Fotog, I have updated my scripts linked on post #44. Please download and run them right away!


You know what, Fotog, you’re so lucky. If you hadn’t of been using the builtin Administrator account you would have been in real hot water, because when you lock the C drive down the way you did, normal administrative accounts would be prevented from running programs with administrative rights. So if you hadn’t of been using the builtin Administrator account and you didn’t enable it it would have been checkmate: no way to gain admin rights, no way to fix the permissions.