Drive Migration ==> NTFS Permissions Nightmare... help!

[tribble]

I'm looking for a way to avoid spending the next year taking ownership of thousands of files one at a time... for some reason, Windows can't change them in bulk. I am in desperate need of your expert mojo help! Here's the story:

I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7 by buying a new hard drive and installing Windows 7 on it. I took my old C drive and mounted it as the D drive, which I named "OldSea."

I ran short of disk space, so I went purchased two 2TB disks, one for live use and one as an offline backup mirror. I installed one 2TB disk, call it NewDisk. I wanted to copy everything from OldSea to NewDisk. I tried just dragging all of the top-level folders over, but explorer would not let me copy most of the folders. I tried right-clicking on the drive, going to security tab, clicking advanced, and adding myself as a permission entry with full control, and then trying to propagate those settings to everything underneath. But, somehow Windows 7 has got it in its head that not only do I not own lots of things on OldSea, but I'm not allowed to propagate new ownership or access permissions through inheritance. I get "access denied" errors for dozens of folders until I got tired of clicking continue and just gave up. I can take ownership of individual folder or files and then give myself "full control" permissions on them, one at a time, but there are thousands of folders and hundreds of thousands of files!

Even RoboCopy in regular user mode would stop copying when it hit one of these folders/files, stating "access denied."

I managed to move all the files to NewDisk by starting a command line as administrator and using robocopy with the /B switch. Now I have a second copy of my data that I do not own and cannot manipulate en masse, and as I get ready to copy NewDisk to its offline backup mirror, I find myself in the same situation.

I can't describe how frustrating it is to not be able to control your own data on your own computer. Can someone please tell me how I can take back my data and get the access rights I deserve without spending the rest of my natural life changing permissions one file at a time?

Thank you!

Best,
Mike

 

[Searchy]

reset all the permissions with icacls

 

[afidel]

Right click on the parent folder, properties, security, advanced, owner, edit, select your name and check the box that says "Replace owner on subcontainer and objects" and hit apply. It will probably tell you you don't have permissions and would you like to change them, click yes. If it doesn't ask and you still can't get in go back to the security tab, click change permissions, add yourself with full control and check replace all child object permissions.

 

[tribble]

afidel: I've done that, it doesn't work.

Searchy: I had no idea what icacls was, where to get it, or how to use it, but after some more extensive Googling I think I have things patched up now. So, thanks for the lead!