Adding Administrator to security of folders.

chops018

Not sure if this is the right place to be posting this but here goes..

I was working on some college work this week, and I have a lot of folders in folders etc. with word documents, pdf files and powerpoints.

This never happened before but a few days ago I went to add a some pdf files that I downloaded to some of these folders, it then came up that I don't have permission to do this, so I went to properties, then secuirty and assigned myself the permission to have full control of the document and the relevant folder so I could add it to the folder I wanted.

This did not bother me as I thought it would be a one time thing, but it turns out that everytime I get a document I have to go in and manually assign permission for myself. Also when I do the action to give myself full control I get an error message saying "an error occurred while applying security information to" ...... the name of the folder and admin of the laptop comes up, then under that it says "the access control list (ACL) structure is invalid".

Anyone have any ideas?? It's really annoying manually doing this, and should I worry about the security message thing??

P.S. I recently restored my laptop, would this have any effect?? I've done this many times before and it doesn't seem to have had an effect the other times I did it.

seamus

Go to the highest level of this specific folder structure (though not the root of the drive). So if it's all in My Documents, then right-click on the folder within My Documents that contains all of these folders.

Assign yourself as the owner of the top level folder and select the checkbox to "replace owner on all subfolders" or something similar to that. This can take a while if you have a few hundred thousand files/folders.

Then go back into the properties screen and change the permissions - assign full control of the folder to SYSTEM, Administrators, and yourself. Remove anyone else listed. Again, select to replace all child object permissions, hit OK and wait.

This typically happens where files/folders are present on a disk and a new OS is installed on the disk without wiping it. The Access Control List on these folders specifies users and groups who do not exist in the new windows installation, so it can cause some issues.

chops018

seamus wrote: »

Go to the highest level of this specific folder structure (though not the root of the drive). So if it's all in My Documents, then right-click on the folder within My Documents that contains all of these folders.

Assign yourself as the owner of the top level folder and select the checkbox to "replace owner on all subfolders" or something similar to that. This can take a while if you have a few hundred thousand files/folders.

Then go back into the properties screen and change the permissions - assign full control of the folder to SYSTEM, Administrators, and yourself. Remove anyone else listed. Again, select to replace all child object permissions, hit OK and wait.

This typically happens where files/folders are present on a disk and a new OS is installed on the disk without wiping it. The Access Control List on these folders specifies users and groups who do not exist in the new windows installation, so it can cause some issues.

Thanks for the reply......

I did what you said and it appears I have full control from the highest specific folder. The folder appears on the desktop, and I right clicked on it, went to security and there it says SYSTEM and then under that it gives an administrator (which is me). Then below that where it says permissions for SYSTEM, full control is checked, the same goes for the admin.

However, I did manually assign most of the sub folders that had issues admins and SYSTEM, but I'm worried about the pdf's that I download, as previously they would not have anything assigned. I just did a test download and it had all the proper assignments so hopefully it was only something temporary with regard that.

I've now noticed that the sub-folders don't seem to have any problems now, and I don't need to provide administrator permission to move a document, however in some of the sub-folders some of the documents have padlocks around them??
Yet they still open fine, save fine, and can be edited aswell. Could there be a virus in my system?? Or should I not worry about these things??

seamus

When you download a file from the web, it automatically takes its permissions from whatever folder it's placed into.

I wouldn't worry too much about the padlocked ones. It means that the owner of the folders is SYSTEM, basically that these are secure folders. As administrator, you still have access.

chops018

seamus wrote: »

When you download a file from the web, it automatically takes its permissions from whatever folder it's placed into.

I wouldn't worry too much about the padlocked ones. It means that the owner of the folders is SYSTEM, basically that these are secure folders. As administrator, you still have access.

Yes, but my downloads before permission was automatically assigned, which meant I could move or delete them without providing administrator permission, as it already had it..

Anyway it seems after some test downloads that the problem is gone.. and I won't bother worrying about the padlocked documents as they were the one's I had to mess around with. But that never happened before.

An interesting point: when I backed up these files today on my portable hard drive everything was normal, all the permissions etc were fine, and no padlocks on the documents were they were in the folder on the desktop.

seamus

chops018 wrote: »

An interesting point: when I backed up these files today on my portable hard drive everything was normal, all the permissions etc were fine, and no padlocks on the documents were they were in the folder on the desktop.

When you copy files to a different disk, the security information is removed and replaced with the permissions on the disk