Lost ownership of Folders and files after removing XP and installing 7

[Abhijeet sharma]

Hello everyone,
So I have been using win XP for many years, 2 years back I installed win 7. Everything was fine but today when I was trying to access 4-5 year old photos the Photo Viewer is giving the error "Windows Photo Viewer can't open this picture because you don't have the correct permissions to access the file location". And some of them I can't even copy to different location.

I have tried Takeown.exe, Icacls.exe and manually changing the permissions for single photos just to verify. NOTHING WORKED. Please help me how to resolve it.

Thanks in advance

 

[Callender]

Try downloading this portable program:

DBC studio

Extract the files and run the executable.

Navigate to a photo. What does it show?

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[murky]

look for a free app called take ownership and download it.
It is a .reg file.
Right click and merge to registry
reboot
For any file or folder, you can now take ownership by right clicking the file and choosing takeownership

 

[murky]

Add "Take Ownership" to Explorer Right-Click Menu in Windows

A download is on this page. It is OK for win 7 also.

 

[Callender]

Add "Take Ownership" to Explorer Right-Click Menu in Windows

A download is on this page. It is OK for win 7 also.

The problem with that is that you don't see current permissions in case you need to restore them.

 

[Abhijeet sharma]

Try downloading this portable program:

DBC studio

Extract the files and run the executable.

Navigate to a photo. What does it show?

View attachment 384465​

View attachment 384466​

Here is what i can see, it's showing that I already have the access. But i still can't access the image :/

 

[Abhijeet sharma]

look for a free app called take ownership and download it.
It is a .reg file.
Right click and merge to registry
reboot
For any file or folder, you can now take ownership by right clicking the file and choosing takeownership

I already have the ownership, or atleast that's what it's showing. :/

 

[Callender]

Thanks for the screenshot. File permissions appear to be okay. Would you find out if some process is locking the folder containing the images?

You can use LockHunter to do that. Right click the folder and select the "What is locking this folder?" option.

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[Abhijeet sharma]

It says no process is locking the folder. But when I select a file it says permission issues.

 

[Callender]

It seems to be an admin account problem. I'm not sure that I can help with that. What do you see if you go to:

Start> Run

then type:

netplwiz

Press Enter.

Post a screenshot of users tab please.

Additionally when you open an image using Windows Photo Viewer a Temp file is created in your AppData folder.

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Maybe there's an issue with permissions for that folder especially if you took ownership of it.

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On my machine that folder has been moved to a non-standard location.

You should look here:

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp

 

[Abhijeet sharma]

Here are the screenshots that you asked for. I don't understand whats the issue :/

 

[Callender]

I'm not sure what the issue is! I was wondering if you had mistakenly taken ownership of your Application Data folder but asked you to look in the wrong place.

If you set folder options to show protected operating system files

Uncheck:

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You should get access denied if you navigate to Application Data which is the way it should be. Is your Application Data folder showing the same?

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Also what is the drive where the photos are stored? Is it a flash drive or something else?

 

[Abhijeet sharma]

Just checked, as you said the access to the application data folder is showing 'Denied".
Also, the photos are in my internal HDD drive.

 

[Callender]

Okay I don't know if this will work but you can try it:

Do you have another folder on the same drive that contains images that you can open? If so navigate to that folder using NTFS Permissions tool and right click then choose "Copy Security Settings"

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Then navigate to the problem folder - right click and choose "Paste Security Settings"

If that doesn't work then I don't know what the problem is. Maybe other members will have ideas.

 

[Abhijeet sharma]

Tried and it didn't work.
I forgot to mention one thing, don't know if it's relevant or not. The names of the files all appear green even if I uncheck the encrypt option from advanced tab access is denied for that action.

 

[Callender]

It might be interesting to see if you can open images using a different photo viewer. Here's a portable one you can test if you don't have anything else installed. It will run without installation.

Simple, easy and well designed applications by xiles

Scroll down the page to:

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If you extract the files and run the program can it open the problem images?

 

[Callender]

Tried and it didn't work.
I forgot to mention one thing, don't know if it's relevant or not. The names of the files all appear green even if I uncheck the encrypt option from advanced tab access is denied for that action.

Well if those files are encrypted that is very likely to be the problem. I don't use any sort of Windows file encryption as I prefer to use third party tools for encryption.

Anyone else want to help out?

 

[Abhijeet sharma]

Even Nexus didn't work, again access denied message.
I don't really remember intentionally encrypting though. :/

 

[Callender]

I know nothing about the encryption problem but here's what I found:

You need to use the same user account that encrypted the files to decrypt and access them.

If they came from another computer you need to get the encryption key from that machine. You will also need to know the password that was used to encrypt the files.