I recently got a new SSD (Crucial T500 2TB) installed in my computer and I did a clean install of windows 10 on it as you should. Within this new windows install, I tried to open an old folder from my previous hard drive and the message “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder. Click continue to permanently get access to this folder” and there is a blue and yellow shield next to the continue button. But all clicking continue does is start an infinite green loading bar across the top of the file explorer page. Any suggestions on how I can access these files again? Are the two versions of windows on my computer fighting against each other or something? Please advise.
You need to claim ownership of the folder. You can do it easily with https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/take_full_ownership_of_files_folders_registry_hack.html this reg file. Install it, then in Explorer go to the folder you’re having trouble with and right click > Take Ownership. A window will pop up showing the progress, once its done you should now have unrestricted access to that folder and its subfolders.
@Asher
I ran it all the way through until the command prompt lines stopped popping up, and when I tried to open the file the exact same thing that was happening before happened. Is there something else I need to type into the command prompt? Do I need to X out of the command prompt?
@Cass
NEVERMIND: it worked! Thank you
Agree with the other comment.
What’s going on is:
You saved it to that drive (which I’m betting is formatted with NTFS, which retains ACL rights).
So your files were “owned” by the account on your OLD OS installation.
You reinstalled the computer’s OS, so when you added your account, by human eyes it looks to be the same (“myComputer\myUserName”).
But in reality, and to a computer, it isn’t. The account has a totally new GUID compared to the old one, so the new “you” don’t own it, the old you does.
This can be gotten around by doing as mentioned: As an admin, take ownership (probably of all the files & folders, recursively).
Or, if you had only put your files on a drive formatted with something like FAT or ExFAT, which don’t retain ACL rights metadata, the files would be ownable by anybody.
@Nathaniel
The take ownership didn’t work, is there a way to reformat the drive without deleting all of the files?
Try taking ownership of the folder and granting yourself full control permissions. If that doesn’t work, the issue might be related to how the files were moved or the previous Windows installation.
My guess is that it’s probably actually working and just taking a long time to go through all the files to grant the permissions.
Something like a user folder that’s been alive for a while can take a long time.
If you don’t want to wait you do have options though. Linux is a tried and true method to ignore permissions like that, go in and copy/move files you want. If you don’t want to do that I’ve often used something called Explorer++ for the task. Unpack it, right click and open as administrator and it should let you navigate almost anywhere. I’ve found copying to normal explorer is not so great but if you click file and clone window you can just use the same program as source and destination for your copies and moves. If you don’t want to trust a third party app the command line as admin will work too. Oh and don’t bother trying to open windows explorer as admin it’d built to never allow that no matter how hard you try(maybe if you enable the built in “administrator” user which is just built different it might be able to navigate in there but that’s a lot of work for little gain in my book)
If none of that works, well, I’m not sure really.
@AstroCipher3
This could’ve been the solution honestly I think I ought have just been impatient… regardless thanks sm