Adil Hindistan

Thanks Jimmy. I did not have time to look at the issue deeper before posting.
I guess many people will have this situation and may be puzzled by the fact
that although their user account is added to "administrators" group by
default and administrators group has full access to all files and folders in
their systems, they will still see "access denied"...

I am not sure if this partly because users who are part of administrators
groups are not in fact regular users most of the time and automagically
become admins when there is a need for elevated rights. It has the same idea
implemented at Ubuntu but does not ask for password by default (could be
modified to do so editing secpol.msc)

Anyway that's not related to the issue. To resolve my problem, I've created
a local group and added both my account and my wife's account to it. As
simply adding this group at the drive level would not help and I needed to
force it down so that all the changes are inherited,
* I made the new group owner of all files and folders
* In the drive securities dialog box, added the new group and granted Full
rights
* In the same dialog box Clicked Edit > Advanced and checked "Replace all
existing inheritable permissions on all descendants with inheritable
permissions from this object"
* Logged off, logged back in & there I got full access to all my XP drives...

"Jimmy Brush" wrote:

> Hello,
>
> <snip>
> > I have the same problem. I installed Vista on a new partition. It can access
> > all the XP files and folders in other drives but they are all read only. I
> > changed ownership to mymachine\administrators for all the files & folders in
> > those drives. That did not fix the issue.
>
> Changing ownership does Not give you access to the files. Changing ownership
> only allows you to edit permissions on the files. The reason I recommended to
> the OP here to change ownership was because he could not change the
> permissions any other way.
>
> Changing ownership on files is not recommened unless you are having problems
> changing permissions.
>
> You still must give yourself permission to access those files in Vista. Find
> the folder that contains the files you need access to (such as My Documents,
> My Pictures, or a folder that you created) This will not work on system
> folders such as Windows or Documents and Settings.
>
> - Open an explorer window
> - Find the folder you need access to
> - Right-click it
> - Click Properties
> - Click the Security Tab
> - Click Edit
> - Click Add
> - Type your username and press enter.
> - Click the checkbox under Allow next to Full Control
> - Click OK
> - Click OK
>
> - JB