Applies to: Windows 7
Here’s the scenario. A friend of mine gave me his old disk drive to have it copied to a new drive. The old drive had permissions set on files and folders. Some of the files were not accessible, I was getting “Access Denied”.
I tried to right-click/properties on the folders that were not accessible and changed their owner and changed permissions but some folders were still inaccessible not matter what I did.
After some research, it turned out the tool “cacls” that allows one to display or change ACLs (access control lists) can help to reset ACLs.
In Windows 7 it is called “icalcs”. To reset files permissions simply do this:
- Run “cmd” as Administrator
- Go to the drive or folder in question, for example:
cd i: - To reset all the files permissions, type:
icacls * /T /Q /C /RESET
That is it!
After that, the files permissions were reset and I could access them just fine.
icacls is a handy tool to change permissions of files en masse.
Hello,
Thanks. Very useful. Had this problem after automatic patch upgrade in Win7. Had used Tweaking.com Windows repair tool to the same effect. I would prefer “icacls”.