Locked out of my files after upgrade

[s44]

OK, I upgraded my system from Win2K to Vista 64. No problem on the hardware side. However, pretty much all of my personal files -- including Firefox settings -- have some wierd permissions set that prevent me not only from copying or moving the files, but from taking ownership of them as administrator. Other user account data doesn't have this problem.

Any suggestions?

 

[mechBgon]

What exactly does happen when you attempt to take ownership of them?

 

[s44]

I get a series of error messages saying it failed, one per (un)affected file. Very annoying since you need to press the button to keep the process going.

Thing is, ownership is set to two users that don't exist any more, with my Win2K install gone...

 

[mechBgon]

Hmmm 😕 Try giving the Take Ownership permission to the folder and sub-folders/files first, and see if that helps overcome the problem: http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/m...wnership_Vista_x64.GIF :camera:

Any good? 😕

 

[s44]

Nope. Same message "An error occurred while... Access is denied."

EDIT: I'm this close to putting an old W2K image back on my OS partition and trying to fiddle around from there. With my luck, though, my trying to access it from Vista will prevent THAT from working too.

 

[mechBgon]

I'm going to heist the HDD out of my Win2000 system and see if I get the same problem (and if so, try to find a solution). Update in 20-30 minutes...

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

Try to Take Ownership in Safe Mode of Vista. I couldn't set permissions or take ownership for a few files with the identical errors, so I tried it in Safe Mode. Worked perfectly.

 

[mechBgon]

I have my Win2000 drive connected to my Vista system, and logged on with my Admin-class account. When I tried to access a user profile in the \Documents and Settings folder, I got a prompt which says:

You don't currently have permission to access this folder. Click Continue to get access to this folder.

The "Continue" button is a UAC-shield button, so clicking it resulted in a UAC prompt, which I approved, and bingo, I was straight into the folder. So I guess that wasn't much help in duplicating the problem in order to solve it 😱

As a practical workaround, you might try a boot CD such as Ultimate Boot CD: http://www.ubcd4win.com/

 

[lxskllr]

Try this

 

[s44]

Originally posted by: BehindEnemyLines
Try to Take Ownership in Safe Mode of Vista. I couldn't set permissions or take ownership for a few files with the identical errors, so I tried it in Safe Mode. Worked perfectly.

It worked! Thank you so much.

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

Originally posted by: s44

Originally posted by: BehindEnemyLines
Try to Take Ownership in Safe Mode of Vista. I couldn't set permissions or take ownership for a few files with the identical errors, so I tried it in Safe Mode. Worked perfectly.

It worked! Thank you so much.

Thank you for reporting, although this is more of a workaround. I am just as confused as you're why booting into Safe Mode works whereas the "Normal" does not even though UAC was prompted properly. It would just give you that meaningless "access denied" error while taking ownership or deleting or moving or renaming or etc...you can open them though.

I remember trying the steps similar to what lxskllr instructed, but that didn't work either. Well I thought maybe a process was locking the files, but Unlocker 1.8.5 said there were no handles locking the files. Only Safe Mode worked. This happened on the five large files that were originally created in Windows XP obviously ran as an administrator. Bug on permissions and/or UAC?