Resolved Take Ownership of whole Drive .. How?

Hi there

Due to major changes on sharing, users, domain to workgroup that was done to a PC with xpWin.prof.sp2, only Admin have full control of the whole hard disk. This means that Power Users & Users of the PC cannot run applications such as Office Word, etc, etc; only Admin can run work them.

I tried to use Sharing & Security, take ownership, replace owner on subcont, etc plus reading some of search on this forum and still no solution. By the way the owner of C: drive is set to administrators.

Gurus please give some pointers. Thanks.

 

Tony I am the Admin of the stand alone PC doing all those things i mentioned earlier. Hence i have to resolve this matter, hopefully with yr help else i would consider repairing or resinstall winxp.prof.

 

Is the pc in question in domain or workgroup ?

 

Thanks rsinfo, it was in a Domain before but is now a stand alone. Hence some the rights had been given the the Domain user, i presume.

 

When you take it out of the domain, all rights granted to domain user would have gone.

Do not try to take ownership of the drive, leave it at Administrator group only, but give read/write rights to Users group to any directory you want them to write to & only read rights for all other areas.

 

rsInfo, thanks. But I have only given the whole drive to the administrators only and for the others users write, create, delete, read rights as u have indicated.

But my question is why then i cannot run the Office App eg Word unless i am the admin. I presume rights on the containers and sub containers need so tinkering to get it back right. Please advice.

 

You don't give blanket read/write permissions to all users for whole of the hard disk. That's a big no no. Everybody should have write permission only for that area where its needed.

Typically read/write permissions need to be set for home directory [in Linux parlance] or user's directory [in Windows] for that particular user only. You don't want whole world to peek into your files.

Check the permissions for directories in C:\Documents and Settings\user name. The user name user should be owner of that directory and other directories under it & should have ALL permissions.

 

rsinfo i totally agree with what u said

BUT still the question i beg to get an answer:
Why then i cannot run the Office App eg Word unless i am the admin. I presume rights on the containers and sub containers need so tinkering to get it back right. Please advice.

 

Set the permission on C:\Program Files\ and C:\Windows for group Users as "Read & Execute ", "List Folder Contents ", "Read" on this folder & all other folders below that folder.

Permission for C:\Documents and Settings\user name for user user name should be "Full Control" for this folder & all other folders below this.

 

Thanks will check it out latter and revert.

PS
Your "Read & Execute ", "List Folder Contents ", "Read" .. Attributes/Permissions (RE,LFC,RAP) to Users open my eyes to find the solution to my problem.

Would like to summarize what i understand for sharing/security & to check if i got it wrong perhaps put a period on this thread.

1) At root directory, Administrators, system & owner has FULL rights even though it my show as special.
Users are given the RE,LFC,R rights Being the root.
Sometimes EveryOne is also given Read & Exe.
All rights are therefore not inherited.

2) At the Program Files & Windows Folders is almost similar to root directory even though the rights are not inherited from the root but created during win installation. Here i don't see EveryOne

3) At specific User's Doc&Setting\User, full control is given to Admin, System & the user. Again these are not inherited.

4) All new sub folders from the root rights are inherited from the root.

 

Administrators & System are the only 2 groups that are allowed access to ALL areas as they are the Owners of system & have to access,read & write files and directories.

Everybody else is given access only for read except to those areas where they write [normally their home directories], or if they have created a directory [ for example if you created a directory test under C:, the attributes/permissions are also set for you as you are the owner of that directory. Any file/directory you create under this directory would also have the proper attributes set. Other users, except Administrators/System group, would be able to read/list files but they would not be able to create/write anything].

 

rsinfo thanks for the quick response with your further clarification. Meanwhile the Office Application is fully operational for all users in the PC. Thanks again.

 

Welcome.