Vista - Is possible to take ownership of a lot of files?

My computer now has the Vista OS, the old OS was the XP. I did not made an
upgrade but Vista was able to keep all my files and move the old os to
windows.old.

Well, the problem is with some files. I have a folder, i.e., with a lot of
files, when I try to open some Vista complains that file could not be
accessed. If I go and take the ownership everything goes ok, of course, but I
have to do it with each file! When selecting all not allows me to change. Is
there any trick to get rid of this?

Thx!

Hi,

You can change owner for whole folder - there is a option "Replace owner on
subcontainers and objects" - owner will be recursively changed.

Marcin Domaslawski


"Magno" <Magno@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5309CEBD-F3C5-4881-A90E-3967EF298242@microsoft.com...
> My computer now has the Vista OS, the old OS was the XP. I did not made an
> upgrade but Vista was able to keep all my files and move the old os to
> windows.old.
>
> Well, the problem is with some files. I have a folder, i.e., with a lot of
> files, when I try to open some Vista complains that file could not be
> accessed. If I go and take the ownership everything goes ok, of course,
> but I
> have to do it with each file! When selecting all not allows me to change.
> Is
> there any trick to get rid of this?
>
> Thx!

"Magno" <Magno@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5309CEBD-F3C5-4881-A90E-3967EF298242@microsoft.com...
> My computer now has the Vista OS, the old OS was the XP. I did not made an
> upgrade but Vista was able to keep all my files and move the old os to
> windows.old.
>
> Well, the problem is with some files. I have a folder, i.e., with a lot of
> files, when I try to open some Vista complains that file could not be
> accessed. If I go and take the ownership everything goes ok, of course,
> but I
> have to do it with each file! When selecting all not allows me to change.
> Is
> there any trick to get rid of this?

Use icacls from the command prompt.

icacls c:\folder /setowner Fred /T /C /Q

Note that "/setowner Fred" says to set the owner to the account named
"Fred"; the /T option says to descend subfolders; /C says to continue if
errors occur, rather than halting at the first problem; /Q says to do this
quietly, so that the only output you see is a list of all errors.

Use "icacls /?" to give you information on what other parameters you could
use.

Alun.
~~~~

Hi! thank you for reply!

Well, bad news! None of the options above solved the problem ... the
icacls got a lot of Access Denied and no files took the ownership. I tried
some options but I really dont know about this command, Vista is new for me :s

I tried the folder option from Marcin and also got the same problem. Only
file by file. The old lost XP user now called S-1-5-21-4339239-1695949.... is
there. I remove it just to clean.

Hugh!!! I did it! By using the folder options! Well, after a lot of clicks
here and there on the Advanced tab I was able to set the folder and files
ownership, I will try to reproduce it in other " locked " folders because I
dont know the exact kick I did.

Thank you all!!

"Magno" <Magno@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:FF209CD1-F74B-4C36-ACEF-E590118CA236@microsoft.com...
> Hugh!!! I did it! By using the folder options! Well, after a lot of clicks
> here and there on the Advanced tab I was able to set the folder and files
> ownership, I will try to reproduce it in other " locked " folders because
> I
> dont know the exact kick I did.

I did it this morning on a set of folders by right-clicking on the root of
the folder tree, selecting Properties, and the Security tab, clicking on
Advanced, then the Owner tab, selected an administrator account, checked the
box to apply to this folder and all children, and finally hit "OK" or
"Apply".

Part way through, it said it had an access denied error descending into a
folder, and did I want to change the rights - I selected "Yes" to do so for
this and all other such folders.

After that, there were still some items I did not have rights to (despite
being the owner), so I still had to go and assign rights to myself as well -
this can be applied to the folder and all children.

I would generally recommend this process only when recovering data - this is
such a sledgehammer approach to manhandling rights, that you will lose
essentially all NTFS permission information, and will have to build it from
the ground up again.

Alun.
~~~~

Download this reg fix from http://www.mediafire.com/?8gz9xhpmwij and just add
it to the registry. The option to take ownership of system files will now
appear in ur rt-click menu. Hope this is what u were looking for !

www.WinVistaClub.com
Microsoft MVP 2007 Awardee.