Fixing Permissions on an External Hard Drive - Windows

Today I pulled a hard drive from my old computer and hooked it up to my new computer, planning to move the data to the new drive and then use the old drive as a backup disk. Mostly this plan worked well, except that I wasn't allowed to delete many files and folders, even though I was an Administrator. Curious.

The problem turned out to be that I was on a workgroup, not a domain, and so the systems didn't have any common notion of "Administrator". Although Explorer knows how to request elevated permissions, this still isn't enough. You have to "Take Ownership" of the files in order to delete them, and there's no way to do this from Explorer.

I found a solution in the winmatrix forum, but it only works for files, not directories. You can't set the Full Control permission on a directory, so you end up being locked out of directories if you try and use these commands:

takeown /f filepath /r
icacls filepath /grant yourusername:f /t

Note that I've added /r and /t to the commands, which is required for the them to operate recursively.

Instead, I did the steps below. These steps assume that the new drive is on E:.

1. Open a Command Prompt with Run As Administrator.
2. Run this command: takeown /f e:\ /r
3. Right-Click on the root of the copied drive.
4. Select Properties.
5. Click the Security tab.
6. Click the Edit button.
7. Select Authenticated Users.
8. Click the checkbox under Allow for Full Control.
9. Run this command: icacls e:\*.* /reset /t
   This command will force all permissions to mirror the permissions on the root of the drive that you set in #6. You must have the *.* or the root directory will be reset, which you don't want.

After these commands completed, I was able to delete all of the desired files. Executing these commands can take quite a while if you have many files on your disk.

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Mehul Patel / www.FB.me/GujaratiKanudo