NTFS owner problem

[Viki]

Hi guys,

I recently had to reinstal XP pro on my Fat 32 C drive
but then my NTFS D drive was "going to sleep" after about
10 minutes of inactivty and I had to reboot to see it
again. Assuming it was a "ownership" problem as I
changed to my married name, I decided to reset my new
login as the drive owner.

All seemed to be working fine with it scanning through
each folder and file and setting me as the owner, but
then the drive went to sleep before it finished and I got
loads of write errors popping up.

Now when I sign in with either my login or as
administrator the drive is not there. Even in "safe mode"

How do I reset the ownerships on the drive so I can see
it again.

Thanks in advance Viki

 

[Roger Abell]

It sounds as though you have two issues here.
One is a hardware issue. For some reason the drive is
being powered down even though it is not inactive.
Is the BIOS used by the motherboard the most up-to-date?
The other is setting permissions for your new account.
This second issue can be easily resolved once the drive
is reliable at a hardware level.

 

[Guest]

Hi Roger, yes something is funny.

The ownership was assigned to Administrator which is an
account I dont use unless there is a problem. Strange
that the power and screen saver options for that account
align to the disk powering off - like the admin power
options were taking over even though admin isnt signed in.

I have semi-rectified the problem since my original
post. Using a different computer I plugged in the disk
and the drive is set for permissions to me and to all
administrators of which I am one.. Therefore I was able
to change the permissions. BUT I can only see the drive
when I plug it back into my pc by setting "everyone" up
with access. It is as if the drive is not setting the
owner details or ignoring them.

Still cant see the drive as admin or owner on my pc
without setting aceess for "everyone". grrrrrrrr
STILL NEED HELP!

 

[Roger Abell [MVP]]

OK, first let's clarify that there are only one set of system-wide
power options, which any admin can set. Users can control
their screen-save type things, but the power options are set by
the system's admins for all users.

You are saying owner, but I believe you are meaning who has
what permissions. While there are both things, it is the NTFS
permissions that control access (or not). There are some things
that run neither as the account you log in with, nor as System,
that are services started in the Local Service or Network Service
accounts. I am not sure either the state of your build or what
all does and does not work before you added the Everyone grant,
but it could have been that some services had not started.
System is (hidden) a member of Administrators, but the other
accounts are not unless you see them listed there (and the
two I mentioned should not be there).
The other thing that might be happening is due to just where you
have changed permissions and where you have not. By default
the perrmissions over a system drive is not uniform, and just
setting the permissions at the top leaves most of the drive
unchanged unless you specifically tell it that it should replace
permissions over the entire substructure. Not sure if the old
NTFS drive (which is not the current boot drive) was once a
boot drive for an XP install, but if so then this non-uniform NTFS
grant structure may be part of your issue.

Also I notice that you said that ownership (permissions?) was
given to Administrator. It would be better to give it to the group
Administrators as that principal will be recognized by all builds
as being the same thing.

OK, it I have this right, you are booting from one drive, and the
old drive - let me call it E: - is a problem.
If at a cmd prompt you run
cacls e:\ /t /g administrators:F
cacls e:\ /e /t /g system:f
and it runs successfully, then you would have one E:\ drive
to which any admin account should have full access. The
System account is also granted full access, but no other
account would have any. This, again, if it does run successfully,
would remove any non-uniform permissions.