Vista - Take Ownership of file

I tried both and one Icacls said successfully processed 0 files.
The last one said The specified local group does not exist

Hi - thanks for the helpful tutorial.

You say: "WARNING: Do not do this to the hard drive partition that Vista is installed on. It can mess up the boot files.". Does this mean that trying to take ownership of any subfolder (e.g. "D:\Foo\) on the boot partition can cause problems, or is to only a wanring not to try to take ownership of the whole partition (e.g. "D:\")?

My situation is that I have a friend's dead laptop (corrupt BIOS - won't start) which has Vista Business and her personal data on the one partition; I want to take out the HDD and use a SATA-USB lead to connect it to my Vista Home machine, in order to copy her data files across. I haven't tried this yet. I don't know (a) whether I'll need to take ownership of her "Documents" folder before I can read from it; and (b) if I do, whether I might then mess up the boot files on the drive such that it won't boot once the BIOS chip is fixed. Any help much appreciated.

Thanks.

Hello Orie, and welcome to Vista Forums.

It is a warning to not do it for the whole C: partition. If you need to, you should be fine for just taking ownership of individual files and folders.

Shawn

Brink: thanks for the welcome, and for clarifying that point for me.

You're welcome Orie.

Shawn

hi i have vista home premium so i need to use the command prompt way but when i open the command prompt it already say C:\Windows\System32> and i cant delete it and when i presses enter it shows up on the next line any help on how i can enter the folder i want

Erm...Im not sure what you mean? You need to enter a command.

After the > just type your command, in your case it would be takeown ...

If you wanted to take ownership of the administrator accounts files for example you would type the following...

takeown c:\users\administrator /r

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Fmjc001

Hi,
I am having a problem renaming my folder which i put in C drive. I have tried the steps as highlighted in the thread.
1) Copy the reg file to desktop
2) Accessed windows explorer as admin
3) Took over ownership
4) Tried to rename ( one before restart and one time after) but to no avail

It still has the same problem. UAC pop up "file operation"> Continue> "Destination Folder Access denied"

I checked all boxes to allow full control for all users but still no use. I am using vista home 32 bit.

Is there anything else i can do or did i miss out anything. Please offer me some advice . Thanks.

UPDATE:
Solved the problem. I was using one folder lock program for one of the sub folders for the file i was trying to rename. Unlocked the file and did a restart and repeated the steps and walla. it worked. Nice forum for looking up solutions for this troublesome system.

I'm happy to hear that you got it sorted out Slaygay. Welcome to Vista Forums.

Shawn

Hi all and thanks, this tutorial (and a few others on these forums) has helped me alot, very easy to follow.

In the end though, to take ownership I had to copy the folder from my external drive to the desktop (as noted in the tutorial). Vista is annoying like that, I could have done everything else right all day, and just missed this one thing..

I guess it's some microsoft preventative measure to stop people messing around with files, other then their 'My documents'. sigh.