Read only box has a green cube forever.

[William Gaatjes]

Hello. Today i was confronted with something i never had seen before. Windows XP - SP2

I copied some files from a drive at work (different administrator rights) to do some work at home(Where i am the administrator). Now i notice that no matter how much i uncheck the read only check box of the files and folders, the folders keep displaying a green cube in the read only checkbox. Even though the files and folders, can all be written to and deleted. Why does this green cube stay present ?

When looking at the security tab (Right mouse button action on folder or file) I noticed there is a user/owner group present from work.

Another question is, i though i could solve it by copying the folder and files to a FAT32 drive that does not have any permissions or user rights capabilities. However, when i copy the file back to my computer with the NTFS filesystem, the user/owner group is present again. I was always aware that FAT32 removes all security information such as ownership and attributes. This user/owner of the file seem to have special permissions i cannot modify.

To be honest, i hardly have any notion of how it works and i have not been keeping up with new software capabilities.

Does anybody have a logical explanation for this ?

 

[stash]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326549

 

[William Gaatjes]

Thank you for the link, but i already tried that. It does not work. I really have to mention that he English to dutch translation is really horrible and that i prefer the English version.

I was googling at the same time and found this :

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/read-only-attributes-green-square-t334369.html

XP just marks all folders indeterminate by default. It is a tri-state check
box. Colored in is indeterminate, checked is read-only, unchecked is normal.
The folders are not read-only and should work as normal. Just ignore the
read-only box on folders. If you have a piece of software that is having
problems writing to a folder then try to get an xp
compatible version of the program. Or post the exact problems you're having.
Most likely if it is a well written app then is it not the read-only check
box, more likely a permissions setting.

Here is some info on it:

XP does this by design. In XP the read only attribute
is only used by explorer to see if the folder is a special or a system
folder. Read up on it:
For XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;326549
or for other win versions:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;256614

File permissions info:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;q308418

It seems it is nothing to worry about.

The owner /user turns out to be me. I checked that as well. It seems i am 3 different groups.
I had multiple problems with a program and a database and was systematically ruling each issue out one by one.

Thank you for the help. :thumbsup:

 

[William Gaatjes]

http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-xp/green-box-mystery-in-winxp/23768.html

Here is what I found out after searching on the MS support page:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q283262

I guess that for icon customization purposes XP makes each folder read-only. If you look at the hidden system files in each folder, ("Tools/Folder Options/View" then uncheck "Hide protected operation system files") they all contain hidden desktop.ini files and therefore will always remain read only. Another wonderful MS bug/feature, right?

I don't know how to fix it but I think this is why XP forces folders to be read only.

It seems all links to microsoft help base are dead links.
I see that all the time. Why do they change it so often ?