Standard Users should not be able to modify files in D:

Question

I have Windows 7 Ultimate edition. There are three Windows accounts of which only mine is Administrator and the other two are Standard. Any other new account will also be Standard only.

I have lots of files and folders in D: that I want to protect from modification by any one of the Standard accounts.

I want Standard user accounts to be able to only view the files but not delete, edit or move them. For example, they can view pictures, play movies, open documents BUT should not be able to save them, rename, edit, delete or move them.

How can I set up Windows to do this?

Answer 1

If the Drive is NTFS, you may right click on the drive and go properties then to permissions, from there you may uncheck permissions for all users except administrators that you do not desire.

Answer 2

Bring up the properties for the files/folders, go to the Security tab, and make sure that the Users group doesn't have "Modify" rights on them.

Administrators should have Full Control by default, so you'll be OK there. However, since you'll be running with a stripped token most of the time (unless you've disabled UAC), you might want to explicitly give your account Modify privileges or you'll constantly be going through elevation dialogs every time you want to modify those files.

BTW, if your users can read the files, they can copy them somewhere else where they have Modify rights. There's nothing you can do to stop that. But Read & Execute will keep them from doing much else.

Answer 3

You can set the Security options on the D: drive through the following steps:

• Open Computer from the Start Menu
• Right click the D: drive
• Select Properties
• Click on the Security tab
  
• Select the Standard Users group and click Edit
• From there you can check and uncheck the options that you want.

Answer 4

It is a fairly straight forward task.

Here's a post about it: http://www.dkszone.net/how-to-change-filefolder-permissions-in