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trying to claim ownership of folders and give myself permission to delete them

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    trying to claim ownership of folders and give myself permission to delete them

    I have some hard disks from other defunct computers that I want to use for storage. I have the hardware to hook the disks up to my computer, and I can easily access the disks, so everything is working -- except for cleaning off the "junk" from the disks. Windows and program folders and such that are given security levels to prevent accidentally compromising the OS, programs, and such.

    So, I go into the folder properties -> security -> and so on -> until I can claim ownership of these folders, and that seems to work successfully. Then I try to give myself (and "Everyone", too) full control over these folders, the OS goes through the process of changing security and such. When all of that is done, and I think I have given myself full control so I can delete things, I try to delete things and it tells me that I need to get permission from myself to delete these folders. This warning message shows that the owner has clearly changed (I can even go in and give "Everyone" ownership and it will come back telling me that I need to get permission from Everyone to delete the folder). The list of permissions claims that I (and Everyone) has full control, but I must somehow be failing to convince Windows that I have permission to delete folders.

    Anybody with enough experience with this sort of thing have any idea what I am missing so I can give myself permission to do stuff on these drives?
    Quote Originally Posted by shg
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    Re: trying to claim ownership of folders and give myself permission to delete them

    This is almost thinking out loud ... but do you need to try and change the file attributes on any of the files and/or folders. They're often set to System and/or Hidden and/or Read Only.

    The only other thought is to copy off anything you want/need to retain and then format the little buggers
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    Re: trying to claim ownership of folders and give myself permission to delete them

    At this point I would re-partition and/or reformat the drives.

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    Re: trying to claim ownership of folders and give myself permission to delete them

    Hi,

    A couple of thoughts:
    1. Did you reboot after doing all of that? It is often required before the permissions actually "take".
    2. You may need to turn off the UAC (User Account Control) before you can truly successfully take ownership and change permissions.
    3. I take it you made sure to apply the permission changes to all the subfolders and files as well?
    Don
    Please remember to mark your thread 'Solved' when appropriate.

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    Re: trying to claim ownership of folders and give myself permission to delete them

    I appreciate the responses. Here's what I have figured out so far.

    I think one of the things I would frequently do wrong is with the different "apply permission changes to subfolders and files" part. I would get several dialogs deep into this, and I would think that I had appropriately checked these, but I think I was missing something. With the most recent HDD, this procedure worked quite effectively:

    1) From "My computer" right click on the drive letter and select properties -> security -> drill down through dialogs to the Edit owner dialog.
    2) Change owner to myself (or even everyone) and check the "change owner on subcontainers and objects".
    3) Ok out of the properties dialog, then bring the properties -> Security dialog back up.
    4) Navigate to the Edit permissions dialog. I removed the Trusted Installer, System, and similar entries.
    5) Give users (and maybe everyone) full control. I think where I was going wrong earlier -- The Edit permissions dialog for each user/group has a "apply to objects and containers in this container only" box that does NOT seem to make the permission change apply to everything inside of the disk/folder. So I learned to leave this unchecked.
    6) Before dismissing the main change permissions dialog, be sure to check the "apply permissions to subcontainers and objects"
    7) OK back out to the top and check that everyone you gave full control to shows full control.

    At this point, I seem to be able to manipulate change delete anything on this drive -- except for the "System Volume Information" Folder (research says this is where Windows stores restore point information). It says I have full control, but I cannot seem to delete anything here.

    Learning stuff along the way. I thought this might be of interest to others.

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