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I had to share my laptop with someone, so I tried to change the access permissions of my storage drive, while windows is on my SSD. But somehow I lost all permissions to my drive.

After trying all icacls techniques, I did a reset and a fresh install, and it still doesn't solve the problem.

enter image description here

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    what happens when you "click change above" as you are prompted?
    – Jaromanda X
    Commented Jun 27, 2023 at 12:02
  • Did you try to change the owner to yourself from the screen in your image? What happened?
    – harrymc
    Commented Jun 27, 2023 at 12:07
  • As an Administrator change the owner of the drive. By default all users have full permission on non-system drives
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 27, 2023 at 12:08
  • While it's easy to write that you tried "all icacls techniques" it would better if you can include what you tried and what the resulting error/messege was.
    – Yisroel Tech
    Commented Jun 27, 2023 at 12:38

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The reason reset and fresh install (of your OS on another drive) didn't help is because those aren't OS permissions, they are file system NTFS permissions which are stored as part of the file system on the drive itself.

To reset the NTFS permissions for everything on the drive (and this would've worked regardless if your OS had been reset or not), Open Commend Prompt as Administrator and first take ownership on the files/drive with the TAKEOWN command:

TAKEOWN /F E:\ /R /D Y

Once you have ownership, then you can reset the permissions using icacls:

icacls "E:\" /reset /T /Q /C
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    Small addition to this already good answer: this solution would even have worked without reinstalling windows.
    – LPChip
    Commented Jun 27, 2023 at 13:08
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    Indeed, I implied this with my opening paragraph, but I'll add it in explicitly.
    – Yisroel Tech
    Commented Jun 27, 2023 at 13:14

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