Hi,
I've been stuffing around with my D: drive permissions for hours now i can't figure out how to grant the two windows and program files folders full permission to delete. the thing is i know how to change one file but i can't get it to automatically set all folders/sub folders can someone please help me with a step by step noob guide?
thanks
Hello. What are you using to set these permissions, icacls at the Command Prompt or the Security tab of the Properties sheet? icacls is the way to go if you need to change many files and folders at once.
Also, why would you change the permissions for these system folders? Which user or group is being granted permission to delete files in %SystemRoot% and %CommonProgramFiles%?
I tried using both method icacls and by the scurity tab without luck.
The reason i need to get rid of it is because i had windows vista on one drive and win 7.. so i decided to get rid of vista, i managed to delete all the files except windows and the program files.. nowi've playing around so much with the permission thing that it looks like I've made it worse.
Right now i'm using the default user name of the system which has full administration rights, all i need to do is give all the files and folders full ownership and deleting permission.. so far my attempt using icacls have failed because i might be using the wrong commands.
could you tell me exactly what icacls commands i need to run to be able to delete these folders?
Thanks
I still don't understand the situation. You had Vista on one drive and Win7 on...what? Another drive? Another partition? If the Vista partition is gone, you should not have a need to delete system files in Windows 7.
If you want to go ahead with this, you can follow the instructions in this article. Just use icacls instead of cacls, as shown. You will notice there is a warning at the beginning of the article, so now you have been warned twice.
The vista partition is still there, I had windows vista on D: and now i'm using windows 7 on C:, i'd like to delete all the remaining files on D:
I tried formatting it through the manage tool and it wouldn't, I'm assuming the permission stuff up has to do with it. That articel is great but i need to be able to do it for all folders and files on D:, any idea how i can do that?
Thanks
Rather than delete all of the files onesie-twosie like, I would recommend that you delete the D: partition and re-create it. This will eliminate all of the files and reset permissions for the whole partition so that every new file created will be owned by you.
If you have no data left on D: that you need, run Disk Managment (diskmgmt.msc), select the D: partition, and choose "Delete Volume". If it won't let you do this from a normal boot, try Safe Mode. After the partition is deleted, select the Unallocated Space where it was and choose "New Simple Volume". Format this newly re-created partition with the NTFS file system and assign it the volume letter D:, if you wish.
Thanks sounds like the right thing to do but the only problem is that this partition has my factory default recovery files so I'm not if it would be a good idea to delete it all.. il try the second solution from safe mode as i tried and it wouldn't allow me.
hopefully this works.
Vista was installed on your recovery partition?!? How did that happen? Who makes the system?
Here's another command to try. The /R switch to takeown will recurse through all files and folders in sub-directories, so run:
takeown /F d:\ /R
Also, you can use the /? switch, by itself, on any command to see the syntax and examples.
Fixed!... i was wrong, the recovery was on a separate partition. i tried deleting the volume from safe mode and that didn't work so what did was insert my windows 7 dvd then went to the installation section where it gave me options to format/delete volumes, first i tried to format it and that didn't work so i deleted the volume then almost had a heart attack when windows wouldn't start but thankfully win 7 was able to repair the boot and everything is working fine now, i just need to format it to ntfs and i'm done.
thanks for all the suggetions and help :)
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