I use an external hard drive for data on my PC. I just connected it to a new PC and it is telling me that this user does not have permission to access the data. Apparently Windows uniquely identifies the owner of the folders and when moved to another computer realizes that it’s a different user.
I could share the folders, but what I really want to do is change the owner.
Is that possible?
I remember the old days when I could just move disks around and Windows didn’t give a rat’s ass.
I, too, was furious with Microsoft’s idiotic decision to enforce ownership and similar file protections by default in an almost exclusively single-user operating system like Vista. The software developer and designer Dave Cutler (supergenius developer of RSX-11M for the PDP-11 and VMS for VAXen) designed and implemented that security methodology for VMS, a time-shared multi-user OS where file ownership protection was a key security principle.
But it makes almost no sense at all on a primarily single-user OS like Windows, so it should never have been made the default for Vista. Fools! What a rotten OS Vista is! What a horrible legacy to hang on Cutler’s undeserving shoulders! Henceforth, like just about every other rational Windows user, I’m sticking to XP for a very, very long time. Retailers and packaged system manufacturers take note: That means I’m not buying any pre-built system until you force MS to return XP to an equal position with Vista!
Anyway, I found that the best solution (for me, at least) was to disable that nonsense completely and permanently. Here’s how:
(1) Select “Settings” -> “Control Panel” -> “Administrative Tools” -> “System Configuration”
(2) Choose the “Tools” tab
(3) Scroll down and select: “Disable User Account Control” & Press “Launch”
(4) Reboot.
You should never have to worry about your issue again.
You do understand that the problem the OP had would have been EXACTLY the same in XP, and has precisely ZERO to do with Vista’s UAC.
The only thing better than being utterly wrong is being utterly wrong at the top of your voice.
Yeah, I’ve been crossing my fingers hoping that the OP might come back and explain that, in fact, he’s using XP, not Vista. That would be hilarious.
-FrL-
I was wondering about the opposite situation: Is there any way to *prevent *other admins from taking over your files? My understanding is that BitLocker would do this, but not standard EFS… is that correct? If so, what can be done if a computer lacks a TPM chip?
Not sure if this is hilarious, but I’m experiencing this by taking data created on an XP machine and moving the disk to a Vista-64 machine. So the ownership was established under XP.
The solution from **drachillix **worked perfectly for me. I felt that the suggestion from **ambushed ** though effective was a bit radical since the computer is on my home LAN, and I do want to control access of certain areas of the drive.
**ambushed **may never have used Windows in a networked workgroup environment. Although the machine itself might be a single-user setup (remember what PC stands for?), you can make data on your hard drive available to any other user on the network, and you control which users are allowed to have what access to what. I might want everybody to have read access to my status report archive, or write access to today’s lunch order, or no access to my [del]porn[/del] proprietary cost data. I can also login in as myself from a different computer and still access my desktop’s hard drive.
I always find it entertaining when we are doing backup images and such that vista has more respect for XP security than XP does.
Reasonable file-ownership security is a really good idea in an OS. Windows, even when used by only one person, would have had a much better security track record if it had made various important files administrator access only, and made the default user not an administrator. But that ship has long since sailed.