How do I reset folder permissions?

I did a system restore yesterday to return to 2 days before I recently got a nasty virus on my computer. I have had tons of problems trying to get my World of Warcraft game configured to where I can play again. When I click to install the game, a message pops up and says .

«Sorry, the installer was unable to start up. You may be out of hard drive space.»

I received an e-mail from their tech support today saying that I would need to contact Microsoft and find out how to reset my folder permissions. Here’s what his e-mail said .

«This is a permission error within windows. Windows is telling the install that it cannot write to that directory. You will need to contact Microsoft to get them to reset your folder permissions if you don’t know hot to do it.»

I am using Windows Vista. How do I reset my folder permissions?

Ø Do you get the installer error only when trying to install ‘World of War’ or when trying installing other applications also?

Ø Did you start a Support request via email with Microsoft to resolve this issue?

If you would like to take ownership of the Drive on which you have Windows installed, you can follow the below steps:

1. Right click on the Drive where you have the Windows installed on your computer.
2. Click on “Properties” on the right click menu.
3. Click on “Security” tab.
4. Click on “Advanced” button at the bottom.
5. In Advanced Security Settings dialog window, click on “Owner” tab.
6. To take ownership of the object, click on the Edit button. Give permission to UAC. Then highlight the user name in the “Change owner to” box that you want to assign as the owner for the object. Click “OK” to finish the process.
7. Back in Advanced Security Settings window, you will see the current owner has changed to the user you just selected.
8. Click “OK” button to exit this window.

Here is article that will give you more information on this:

You can also try the below steps to fix this issue if you get this error only when trying to install ‘World of War’:

Delete the files in the Temp Folder:

1. Click on start and type %Temp%.

2. From the temp folder, delete all the files and folder by pressing ‘Ctrl’+’A’ and Delete from the key board.

3. Some of the files may be not deleted as in use, you may ignore the files and folders.

Copy the installation files to the desktop and try to install:

1. Create a new folder on your desktop and copy the installation files from the CD to the folder.

2. Try to start installation using these files

Set your computer to clean boot and install the patch:

How to perform clean boot on the computer running Windows Vista

1. Click Start, type msconfig in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or for a confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.

2. On the General tab, click Selective Startup.

3. Under Selective Startup, click to clear the Load Startup Items check box.

4. Click the Services tab, click to select the Hide All Microsoft Services check box, and then click Disable All.

6. When you are prompted, click Restart.

7. After the computer starts, check if the issue is fixed.

If your issue is resolved after performing Clean Boot, then follow the steps mentioned in the following KB article to narrow down the exact source:

If you can isolate one service that is selected when the problem occurs, that service is the one that causes the problem. If you determine that a service is causing the problem Normal startup mode following the steps under ‘ Reset the computer to start as usual’.

Run disk clean up:

Here is a link that will give you more information on ‘How to run Disk clean up’ on your computer:

Thanks,
Irfan H, Microsoft Answers Support Engineer. Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think

How do i reset/strip a folder of all permissions settings?

Here are the steps to modify ownership and permissions of folders and files:

a. Right-click the file or folder, click Properties , and then click the Security tab.

b. Click Advanced , and then click the Owner tab.

c. Click Edit , and then do one of the following:

To change the owner to a user or group that is not listed, click Other users and groups and, in Enter the object name to select (examples) , type the name of the user or group, and then click OK .

To change the owner to a user or group that is listed, in the Change owner to box, click the new owner.

d. If you want to take ownership of the contents of the folder, select the Replace owner on sub containers and objects check box.

e. Click OK , and then click Yes when you receive the following message:

You do not have permission to read the contents of directory folder name. Do you want to replace the directory permissions with permissions granting you Full Control?

All permissions will be replaced if you click Yes.

Note: folder name is the name of the folder that you want to take ownership of.

f. Click OK , and then reapply the permissions and security settings that you want for the folder and its contents.

Additional considerations

An administrator can take ownership of any file on the computer.

Assigning ownership of a file or a folder might require you to elevate your permissions using User Access Control.

How to reset File & Folder permissions to default in Windows 10

If you had to change the permissions of files and folder in Windows for some reason, and if you want to reset the permissions to default, this post will help you. One of the users reported that he had to set the ownership and permissions to everyone and full control for a specific task, and now that it’s done, getting back to the default permission is difficult. Since the option is not built into the system, we will have to use the secedit and icacls commands to reconfigure.

How to reset File & Folder permissions to default

Security is essential, and it is not just that other users can access the files, but programs you install on the computer also get the same access. The good news is that fixing the permissions to default is easy, and all you need is to run a command-line program to fix it. Before going ahead, create a system restore point, so in case things go wrong, you can restore.

1. Run icacls command
2. Run Secedit command

You will need admin permission to execute the commands.

1] Run icacls command

Another method to resolve this using the icacls command. However, you will need first to take ownership of the folder and then execute the command. Windows uses the Access Control List to configure permissions for all files and folders. Icacls is a command-line utility that can display and modify the permissions on specified files and apply them.

It comes with a reset option that replaces ACLs with default inherited ACLs for all matching files. We will use the following options to reset

• t—Operates on all specified files in the current directory and its subdirectories.
• q—Suppresses success messages.
• c—Continues the operation despite any file errors. Error messages will still be displayed.

Next, run the following on an elevated command prompt—

Once done, you must save the permission into a file that you can use again later or apply to other computers.

2] Run Secedit command

It allows you to configure and analyze system security by comparing the current config with a template.

Configures and analyzes system security by comparing your current security configuration against specified security templates.

Type CMD in the Run (Win +R) prompt and then press Shift + Enter to open it with admin permission

Execute the following command-

You may get some warning, but you can safely ignore it.

Changing permission on Windows is tricky because there is no way to switch back to default permission once you change it. It should have been there right from the start and let Windows users fix it themselves.

I hope these commands were useful and helped you reset file & folder permissions to default in Windows.

Date: October 27, 2020 Tags: Files, Folder

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Ashish is a veteran Windows, and Xbox user who excels in writing tips, tricks, and features on it to improve your day to day experience with your devices.

Reset file and folder permissions of external hard drive data to default in Windows 7

I have an external hard drive, changed some security settings of files, and now I am not able to access them in my other system. I am an admin in this system. Is there any tool that can reset all of the security settings of all contents to default?

4 Answers 4

You can do this with the GUI — take ownership and then reset everything —

Right click root folder > properties > security > advanced > owner (tab) > edit > choose your account from the list (or select from the Other Users or Groups button) and select «Replace Owner on subcontainers and objects»

There is also a «takeown» command, i.e. if the files are on a drive that you see as E: —

Once you have taken ownership, then you have to set the permissions; for this, you use ICACLS:

Alternative ways of changing the permissions with ICACLS can be found with «ICACLS /?» as you can explicitly add your permissions, replace, etc.

There is a nice tutorial with screenshots (including the one here) at http://www.askvg.com/guide-how-to-take-ownership-permission-of-a-file-or-folder-manually-in-windows/ although it shows you how to do the whole process from the GUI.

The command works fine.

The command did not work, but had to add an asterix (*) to it. As an example:

For those who bumped in to the same problem as me.

Debra gave the suggestion which worked very well for me. Many many thanks Debra! I wish I had the repo to vote up for your answer 🙂

Below is what my side of the story was and what I did to solve it..

My problem goes like this — I had Windows 7 Ultimate x86 installed on my dell studio earlier which developed some bad sectors over the years, and suddently the system started failing abruptly hence I replaced the hard disk with a new 500GB one and installed the same Windows 7 Ultimate x86 on the new one.

I did not take backup of my personal user files which I kept inside old documents or desktop as I thought using the Administrator account it could be done from the new HDD as we used to do in Windows XP.Well thats where I went wrong!!

WIndows 7 has some crancked up security inbuilt, which avoids any other guy to step inside your personal files just like that. Basically I couldn’t access my old files when I connected the previous HDD. When I tried going into Users\Administrator or Users\MYUSER directory it just said — «Access is Denied» or went on showing the progress circle indicator for infitely long time and never actually opening it.

So I followed this amazing tutorial about how to change ownership and permissions in Windows 7 using GUI — http://www.blogsdna.com/2159/how-to-take-ownership-grant-permissions-to-access-files-folder-in-windows-7.htm

But it didn’t work out for me as my permissions in old Windows also were pretty wasted. So I came to This article and it worked!

Following is what I did in (order of appearance) —

1. Started my windows PC with the target hard disk connected that has the folder I want ownership to.
2. Went to Control Panel.
3. Opened Administrative Tools (it’s under System & Security when viewing categories)
4. Then clicked Computer Management (2nd from the top).
5. Then open Local Users and Groups
6. Inside that you will see two sub categorizations — Users, Groups. Open Users
7. That should display 3+ Users. Top one will be Administrator. Right click it and select Properties
8. Uncheck the «Account is Disabled» setting and then select ok.
9. Then close all windows, and logoff / restart your windows.
10. This time you should see a new user as the first one — Administrator, click it to login as Administrator to the computer.
11. Now the real game begins.
12. Click Start button and type cmd in the search box, when appeared right-click cmd and Run as Administrator (Elevated Command Prompt is what will get us there)
13. Now go to My Computer and check the drive letter which is available as a mounted active partition in your windows, remember it’s drive letter. e.g. ‘F’ (This is the partition which contains those Users directories which you want access to).
14. Now go to command prompt we opened in step 11 and type that drive letter e.g. F: and press enter
15. Then change directory to the parent directory of the folder you want full ownership to. e.g. If I want access to all files and directories inside «F:\Users\Administrator\» I would cd to F:\Users
16. Now as mentioned by Debra run following commands —

F:\Users>TAKEOWN /F F:\Users\Administrator\ /R /D Y (all dirs under will be owned)

F:\Users>TAKEOWN /F F:\Users\Administrator* /R /D Y (any left over files will be owned too)

F:\Users>ICACLS «F:\Users\Administrator*» /reset /T

1. One both the commands ran, I went to My Computer, opened the F: drive and successfully was able to browse inside the Users\Administrator directory and view, copy, cut or delete them to my destination.

Quickly Reset NTFS Permissions in Windows 10

Sometimes you need to reset custom NTFS permissions applied to a file or a folder in Windows 10. After performing this operation, all custom access rules will be removed, and inherited permissions will be restored.

NTFS is the standard file system of the Windows NT operating system family. Starting with Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 6, it supported the concept of permissions which can be configured to permit or restrict access to files, folders, and other objects locally and over a network.

Permissions

By default, almost all system files, system folders and even Registry keys in Windows 10 are owned by a special built-in user account called «TrustedInstaller». Other user accounts are set to only read the files.

As a user accesses each file, folder, registry key, printer, or an Active Directory object, the system checks its permissions. It supports inheritance for an object, e.g. files can inherit permissions from their parent folder. Also every object has an Owner which is the user account that can set ownership and change permissions.

If you are interested in managing NTFS permissions, refer to the following article:

Permission types

In short, there are two types of permissions — explicit permissions and inherited permissions.

There are two types of permissions: explicit permissions and inherited permissions.

Explicit permissions are those that are set by default on non-child objects when the object is created, or by user action on non-child, parent, or child objects.

Inherited permissions are those that are propagated to an object from a parent object. Inherited permissions ease the task of managing permissions and ensure consistency of permissions among all objects within a given container.

By default, objects within a container inherit the permissions from that container when the objects are created. For example, when you create a folder called MyFolder, all subfolders and files created within MyFolder automatically inherit the permissions from that folder. Therefore, MyFolder has explicit permissions, while all subfolders and files within it have inherited permissions.

Effective permissions are based on a local evaluation of the user’s group membership, user privileges, and permissions. The Effective Permissions tab of the Advanced Security Settings property page lists the permissions that would be granted to the selected group or user based solely on the permissions granted directly through group membership.

By resetting effective permissions, you will restore NTFS permissions of files and folders back to their default inherited permissions.

Quickly Reset NTFS Permissions in Windows 10

To reset NTFS Permissions in Windows 10, do the following.

1. Open an elevated command prompt.
2. Run the following command to reset permissions for a file: icacls «full path to your file» /reset .
3. To reset permissions for a folder: icacls «full path to the folder» /reset .
4. To reset permissions for a folder, its files, and subfolders, run the command icacls «full path to the folder» /reset /t /c /l .

Substitute the example paths with the actual values matching your system.

Here are some screenshots.

Default (inherited) permissions:

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About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

11 thoughts on “ Quickly Reset NTFS Permissions in Windows 10 ”

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Thank You so much
You saved a huge time for me by only a command
Thaaaaaaaaaaaaanks

Doesn’t work on me: getting a lot of “Access denied” 🙁

Well, win10 64bit #1709.
I tried it on c:\, it resulting in:
Successfully processed 0 files; Failed processing 4308 files.
c:\>

Might this work on a system that doesn’t even boot into safe mode? So, can you run it from a running Windows system that is not the one you want to fix? I’m running an external Windows to go system, win 10 1607 and it’s my internal hard drive that I need to fix. Luckily, I can get into safe mode as an administrator, so I will try it. I deleted all the s-1-5 entries in that registry, not knowing that it was important.

Hello, I had an issue a couple Windows 10 updates ago, the permissions for D:\Program Files\ and sub folders changed (not Windows install drive btw) and some games complain when running they can’t open this or that file. I use the icacls command and it seems to work but after reboot the permissions are re-applied and the issue return. Any idea how to make them permanent?

What are permissions after the restart? To which state they go?