Can Windows 7 file and folder permissions be disabled?

Question

I have a Windows 7 desktop computer with an external hdd always plugged in. Almost all files get put on the external hdd and the other day I wanted to take the external hdd and plug it into my laptop. I did this and found that I had to change the permissions on files that I wanted to open on the laptop. This was fine, but then I took the external hdd back to the desktop computer, plugged it in and was told to change the permissions back. I did this, but none of the files on the external hdd could be opened. I was eventually able to gain access to the files by copying them onto the computer hdd and then copying them back to the external hdd. This is quite time consuming when I've got around 50GB of stuff and it is rather annoying to have to do this every time I want to move the external hdd.

I was wondering if it was possible to remove or disable permissions on files and folders so that I can take the external hdd, plug it in to any computer and be able to open all files.

Answer 1

Easiest way I could think of to do this is to use the exFAT filesystem rather than NTFS on the external Hard Drive. exFAT doesn't use Windows Permissions by default so you wouldn't have this issue.

However, You may have issues accessing the drive if you use computers other than Windows computers as they may not support exFAT.

Alternatively, if you don't want to format the drive, you could just make sure the permissions are set to Everyone has access to Read/Write/Modify on the root of the drive, and then make sure it propogates that to all child items.