I'm using the 32 bit version of Home Premium on my laptop, and the drive permissions
agree with my Desktop, which uses the 64 bit version of Vista Ultimate. Unless you changed it, yours should be the same.
As you stated, on the Security tab under drive properties, you have four names listed under Group or user names:
Authenticated Users
SYSTEM
Administrators
Users
All 4 are Group names. Next to Administrators & Users, you should see a path . It should look like: (name of your pc\Administrators) and (name of your pc\Users)
These are the basic groups that come with Vista, with permissions already setup for you. There really should be no reason for you to change these permissions. As you say you are the only user of the pc, the defaults should have worked. You gave the Users group Write permissions to the H: drive, and that is something you shouldn't of had to do.
If you click on the 4 Groups listed for the drive, you should see that Authenticated Users has everything checked except for Full control. SYSTEM & Administrators have everything checked. Users should only have 3 things checked. Those 3 things are all a user needs to run a program, and create their own files.
You may have notice that Special permissions isn't checked for any of the groups. Leave it that way, as using it can create more problems than it solves.
Sadly, Vista Home Premium doesn't give you control over the Groups & User accounts like the non Home versions of Vista do. You might be able to get around the limitation using the command line, but it's not easy, so I won't go into it. If you are curious though, do a search in help for "Net user", "Net localgroup" and "Net group"
Lets take a look at the User accounts. Hit the start orb, click on Control Panel. Click on Classic View, then look for User Accounts. Double click on it, and you should see Make changes to your user account. Under it, you should see Manage another account. Click on it, and say yes to the UAC.
You should see 2 accounts, yours & Guest. You should see that your account is an Administrator account, and it may or may not be password protected. If you double click on it, you will see options for the password, to change your picture, the account name, or to change the account type. Click on manage another account, and double click the Guest account.
If you read what it says, you will see that the guest account has very limited access. I use this account when I have company over, and someone wants to use my pc. This way I know that they can't mess up anything on my computer. Hit the Cancel button, and go back to the Manage Accounts window, then click Create a new account.
As Home is limited, you only have 2 choices, Standard user, and Administrator. You never will want another Administrator account on your pc, so you will always chose Standard user. Give it a name, and hit create account. You should now see the account in the Manage Accounts window.
You should give it, a password. If you haven't already, you should do the same for your account too. It's worth doing to me, just to keep people out of your business. You might want to consider using the new Standard user account everyday, and only use the Administrator account when you have to. It might be a pain at first, but if you ever do get malware or a virus you will thank me.
Using a Standard account will stop both malware and any virus from doing any major harm to your system. They won't be able to, because they won't have permission. However, with your current Administrator account, if it gets infected, they have full control to do what they will.
Getting back to your H: drive, when you gave the Users group write permissions, you gave pretty much anyone using your pc the ability to write to that drive. Yes, that will & did fix your problem, but there is a better way to do it.
Under the Security tab for the drive, hit the Edit button, and hit continue to the UAC.
In the Permissions for H:, hit the Add button. In the box for Enter the object names to select, type the name for your account, then hit the Check Names button. Doing that should fill in the path for your account. Hit ok, and you should now see your account listed in the Group or user names list. Since it is an administrator account, give it full control. Now remove the write permissions for the Users Group. Then hit Apply, then OK.
Now test it. It should work, and this way you keep access to the drive restricted.
Ideally there should be one drive that only I have access but I don't know how to accomplish that.
You would change the permissions to do it. Since you now have that new account, I'll use it to explain how to remove access to the H: for it. Going back to the security tab for H:, you should now have the 4 original Groups, and your Administrator account listed. Highlight the Users group, and hit the Edit button, and hit continue to the UAC. When the Permissions for H: window opens, select the Users group, then click on Deny Read & execute. You will notice that the other two selections have also moved to Deny. Hit Apply, then OK. You will have to log out of your Administrator account, then log into the Standard account to test it.
The reason for so many drives is for maintainance, defrag, etc. I'm still a Win98 holdover.
Ahh, that's what I thought. With NTFS, there really is no reason to do this anymore.
This article explains it pretty well. The only reason I would partition now would be to run multiple operating systems.
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