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#1
Ownership of C Drive (System Drive)
Hello everyone.
I had some problems with my C drive a few days ago. Scanning the disk revealed multiple bad sectors, and the laptop took a full night to fix itself (it literally scanned the whole night long again and again until the bad sectors were no more). Anyway, it came right in the end, but I was denied access to the C drive. Completely. For example, I could access the files in My Documents folder and the like, but I could not copy them elsewhere. I am the only user of the computer, and my user account is that of an administrator.
So, I poked around the Internet to get some information, and I did a bit of reading about taking ownership and granting permissions. In hindsight, I guess I should have read just a little bit more before doing anything. Anyway, long story cut short, I took ownership of the entire C drive, including its subcontainers and objects, and gave myself full control permission settings.
Now, I no longer have problem accessing the drive and what not, but I am beginning to wonder if it is a good idea to retain this ownership. I would LOVE for the ownership and permissions to revert back to its original settings (when everything was working fine and the bad sectors have not yet appeared), except that I do not know what the original settings are. And unfortunately, I cannot do a System Restore because there are currently no restore points on the system (somehow they have all disappeared after that one night of disk scanning).
I've read from somewhere that by default, the owner of the C drive is TrustedInstaller. However, I've also read from another somewhere that the default owner of the C drive is SYSTEM. And then from somewhere else, it was YOUR_PC_NAME\Administrators as the default owner. Most of them said the one same thing though: not all of the folders/files in the C drive are owned by TrustedInstaller/SYSTEM/etc, therefore it is hard to say whether or not the ownership of the C drive should be TrustedInstaller/SYSTEM/etc.
I am hesitant to do anything further until I am absolutely sure that I will not be messing things up more than I already have. I mean, at the moment I am not having any problems from the ownership, but it has only been a couple of days, so I guess you can argue that something could still happen?
Please, what are all your thoughts on this matter? Should I:
1. Change the ownership of the C drive to TrustedInstaller, along with all the subcontainers and objects within it?
2. Leave the ownership of the C drive as it is, i.e. leave the owner as myself?
3. Take no chances and do a Repair Install?
Please advise.
Many thanks in advance.