changing file owner

[ratsrcute]

I'm getting a few problems that seem related to the fact some of my files and folders are owned by the administrator or require administrator permissions.

I use GFI Backup. It reports problems with lacking permissions to access certain files -- unless I turn off UAC.

Also there are many folders on a hard drive which is separate from my system hard drive and existed before I installed Windows 7. It seems many of those folders require administrator permission to rename and move and such.

How can change the owner or permissions to remove these problems?

Mike

 

[Brink]

Hello Mike,

If you like, you could use the "Take Ownership" context menu item added with the tutorial below to quickly take ownership and permission of files to help.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/1911-take-ownership-shortcut.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[ratsrcute]

Thanks, that seems like a nice idea, but I'm a programmer and I'm curious how the system works. I notice that the tutorial you linked to has many related tutorials about permissions and owners. I think I'll read those and try to understand the underlying system. Assuming I'll find my answer somewhere in there, I'll mark this as solved.

 

[Brink]

I hope they can help. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have.

 

[ratsrcute]

I'm going to re-open this question because I have a specific question.

So my problem is that when UAC is active, GFI Backup can't read some files (or I don't know if the problem is reading specifically, but it just gives an access permissions error). I looked over the tutorials for changing permissions, but I really don't have a clue what to do, because:

- I don't know what user GFI Backup runs as (note that it makes a snapshot of the disk so that it can read files that in use)
- I don't know what permissions it needs to read a file (that seems weird, it can't even *read* a file). I mean, there is a long list of permissions associated with every file.
- I can't find how to manually change the owner. I realize you have a nice shortcut tutorial there, but I really want to understand how to do it through Windows 7

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Brink]

Mike,

If you haven't already, see if using Run as administrator with GFI Backup may give it the rights it needs to have access.

 

[ratsrcute]

I don't manually run GFI backup. Looking at msconfig, I see two related services and one related startup item. How do I run these three items as administrator? (GFI backup does automatic scheduled backups, hence the need to run in the background at startup)

 

[Brink]

If GFI Backup runs an exe file, then you could use OPTION FIVE in the tutorial above to set the .exe to run as administrator using compatibility mode.