Moodie1

Okay, I've done some research (both online and in my Win7 help file) on my "access denied" problem and it seems to me that this has nothing to do with UAC and everything to do with file permission settings. Moving the UAC slider to another setting would only affect how easy or hard it would be for Windows programs (*not* project files) to be changed. OTOH, modifying file permissions *would* directly affect which users have editing rights to files. I just visited http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/windows-7-access-denied-permission-ownership/ and tried JohnnySmith0's fix. After some trial and error I finally solved the problem. It's a bit involved but here's how I did it: 1. In Explorer (yes, I found it!) right-click on the drive to be affected (or right-click on a data folder). Click on Properties. Click the Security tab. 2. Click on the user name of your account to highlight it. I had two (I don't know why), Administrators and Users. I chose Administrators. 3. Click the 'Edit' button. A new window will open, named 'Permissions for...'. Highlight your username in this window. 4. At the bottom are the permission checkboxes for this user. The 'Full control', 'Modify' and 'Write' boxes will probably be unchecked. Check them. 5. Click the 'Apply' button at the bottom. A small window will appear showing all the files on that drive having their permissions changed. 6. When all the files have been updated click the 'OK' button. The Permissions window will close. Click the 'OK' button on the Properties window to close it. 7. Repeat these steps for all folders/drives where you have data (projects). That should do it. This worked for me. I can now edit any file on this drive and save the file normally. BTW, I didn't check the 'Special Permissions' box, not knowing what that term applies to. Also, I don't recommend doing this for Windows or program folders on the C: drive, although I could be wrong about that.

Uhhh... I hate to admit this, but I've never used Explorer (almost never, anyway). Ever since my first PC, I've always used a third-party file manager instead. I *really* got used to two-pane file managers, which MS took *forever* to bring to Windows. To this day, right-clicking on 'Copy' or 'Move' in one window and then 'Paste' in another seems a bit unnatural to me. Also, when I click the Start button (at the bottom left) I don't see an entry for Explorer. How do I get to it? If this helps, I can create a shortcut for an old file and drag it to the desktop. This works okay. But I still can't edit it. BTW, the files open okay, but if I change them in any way Windows won't let me save them.

I had an issue with 'Read-Only' on my WinXP system. Somehow, a few R/O files caused the system to see the entire top-level folder as Read-Only and when I cleared the R/O attribute for those files and the top-level folder as well it seemed to work but if I immediately checked the folder's attributes it would still have a gray (not black) checkmark in 'Read-Only'. Strange, but it didn't affect any of the other files. IOW, the folder showed as 'Read-Only' (partially, anyway) but the files in it were not. BTW, the reason I used the word "project" when I said "WordPad project folder" was to indicate that that's the folder where I keep most of my text (.rtf) projects, which are *not* on my C: drive. If I was referring to the Windows C: drive folder where the WordPad program resides I would have said "WordPad program folder". If I was referring to the folder where I keep a program's downloaded installable file I would call it an "install" folder (not a "program" folder, and certainly *not* a "project" folder). Call me anal but I've found from many, many years of using computers that it helps to be *very* rigid with your terminology. The .rtf file I'm attaching should give you all more than a few laughs, I hope. This file was made with my WinXP system. insights & clever wordplay.rtf

Okay, how do I attach a file? Is it the button at the top left corner (the one next to 'Remove Format'?) (the one with NO tooltip)?!?! :angrym:

Nope, didn't work. I downloaded your file, saved it as 'ownership.reg' and ran it. Regedit said the info was successfully integrated into the registry. Then I went to my main WordPad project folder and right-clicked on 'Take ownership'. I got the DOS window showing all the scrolling file entries. Then I tried editing a file from that folder with WordPad and got an "Access denied" error message. I assume taking ownership of a folder affects *all* the files inside it, including all the subfolders as well, right? FYI, the runas subentry is now present in the registry.

@ Kelsenellenelvian: Oh, you want me to add these lines to the registry, not edit them, right? Oops, our posts crossed. I'll try this. Give me a few minutes. When you say "copy" should I also copy the top line ' Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 '? Is that required?

@ Kelsenellenelvian: I opened Regedit. There's HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, *, and shell but no runas, only removeproperties. What now?

Oops, please ignore my complaint above about the new WordPad. I just noticed the Word Wrap function. Sorry 'bout that.

Thanks, jaclaz. I'll check that option out. The HD in question has only one partition, 1TB, formatted as NTFS. I also have another problem, one which I have to assume most everyone who upgraded to Windows 7 had at one time. I have tons and tons of files of all types on my drives and now that I'm using Win7 I can load them but I can't edit them due to MS's intrusive UAC. I can't even move them from one folder to another! MS says to adjust UAC (or turn it off) but I don't need to (or want to) do this for my program files, just my project files. MS seems to lump files of *all* types into its UAC, even .txt and .rtf files! If I'm correct about this then this is utter idiocy!!! I have only one user account on my system, I assumed that it would get administrator privileges by default. Am I wrong about this? How can I get Win7 to give my user account unhindered access to all my old files and at the same time reserve UAC only for files that it should be protecting? Can I set UAC so that it doesn't apply to certain filetypes? Is that possible? I now understand all the bitching other users constantly make about UAC if it prevents users from doing anything at all that's related to working with something as basic as text files. Another thing. I now see that WordPad in Win7 has been upgraded into something very similar to MSWord! It now treats text as if it's on paper, with onscreen margins, just like MSWord. One thing I liked about the old WordPad was that it didn't do this. In the old WordPad if you narrowed the window the text would wrap so that all the text was still visible, no matter how narrow you made the window. The new WordPad no longer does this. Can I get this behavior back in the new WordPad? Or, alternatively, can I install the old WordPad in Win7 and use it alongside the new one? FPS! If I wanted my scratchpad text formatted for paper I'd use MSWord.

Okay, Win7 Home Premium installed well on my 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue HD. I've reset my logon for this forum and are now changing drive letters for all my HDs to fit my preferences. One (hopefully minor) problem: Win7 currently doesn't recognize one of my internal SATA NTFS HDs (a 1TB Seagate ST31000528AS). It's saying I have to initialize it first (and probably format it, too). IIRC, this drive got screwed up somehow when I first added it to my system many months ago. Somehow it got two separate letters, one as a normal SATA drive, the other as a SCSI drive (both for the entire physical drive). I could never access the SCSI part but the SATA part worked just fine. It's now filled with files that I'd like to backup to a separate HD before reformatting it. It shows up in Disc Management as 'Unknown' and 'Not Initialized'. Can I just initialize it without formatting it? It was working fine under WinXP. Alternatively, if I format it can I recover the files from it later?

Bad news and good news. Just this morning I discovered a scratch on my WinXP disc, small but deep. It must have happened in just the past couple of days, while it was out of its cardboard sleeve on my worktable. I figure I must have accidentally gouged it with the corner of one of my disconnected HDs. So maybe that's what's keeping my system from reading it. But a good friend of mine called today and said she'd give me the money for a new OS disc! I suppose that's understandable since I've helped her and her husband out in many other ways in the past, especially with their computer. I've just come back from their place and a computer store with a Windows 7 32-bit full-install disc. So now I intend to disconnect all my other HDs and install Win7 Home Premium on my 500GB HD. If all goes well I'll probably close this topic soon.

Sorry to try your patience, jaclaz. I tried to repair boot.ini, using the instructions on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022 but the sample files given were for WinXP Pro and Win2000, nothing for WinXP Home, which is what I have (actual MS upgrade CD of version 2002 with SP1 included). Not wanting to chance ruining my system even more by using the wrong files, I decided not to try any further. Also, the info given in a previous post above on this file didn't mention exactly where this file would reside. And since this file is missing on my system I can't even search for it. So even if MS Support had a sample file for WinXP Home I wouldn't know where to copy it. And I know that Windows can boot without it, that's how I've been able to use my PC all these many months. The 500GB HD I'm trying to install XP on is a Western Digital Caviar Blue (WD5000AAKB) and the 160GB HD with WinXP (installed from the same CD in 2009) is a Western Digital Caviar SE (WD1600AAJB). And I know all about all those programs that "find" problems with your system but won't "fix" them until you pay for them. To return to the issue, I can still use my PC (somewhat, since most of my programs won't run). I can still go online with it, that's how I'm able to post to this forum. What doesn't work right now are my CD/DVD drives. (See below.) Ver-r-ry strange. The only removable disc drive that's currently connected is my Lite-On SOHW-832S DVD-RW drive. I thought at first that it wasn't working but now I don't know. I've just checked it, it reads CDs and DVDs okay but it doesn't see my WinXP install disc! And yet it did see it when I first started posting to this forum (see section 4 of my January 6th post)! Weird! Oh, and BTW, in my January 6th post I mentioned that at shutdown that night Windows installed 26 updates. Well, apparently they didn't "take" because the very next night the exact same thing happened, 26 Windows Updates again. So I waited once again for all of them to install so I could make sure the PC shut down normally. So what happens? Today when I shut down the system to connect the previously disconnected BD-R drive along with a couple of my internal HDs I get the same thing! This time I skipped the updates install, figuring that the install wouldn't finish anyway. And on rebooting I once again got the error message about a SATA drive being configured as an IDE drive. I figure it's my BD-R drive which I haven't installed the manufacturer's drivers for yet. (BTW, it's an LG HL-DT-ST BD-RE WH10LS30.) I'll try installing WinXP once again tomorrow.

Good God! I just spent the last 6+ hours trying to get my PC to boot! I tried every combination of HD, jumper, BIOS boot settings I could think of with no success. I tried installing Windows on the 500GB PATA HD I mentioned previously - no joy, the WinXP CD wouldn't boot from either of my CD/DVD drives (I always thought that Windows boot CDs installed the CD-ROM driver(s) from the CD and didn't depend on the driver on the HD). I also found an old but good 160GB PATA HD that had a usable WinXP install that I thought I could boot from - no joy there either. Each time the boot would get to the point where the hotkey options would appear (Del for BIOS Setup, f12 for Boot Menu, etc.) and then it would hang for upwards of 20-30 minutes! A couple of times I got an error message that said something about a SATA CD-ROM drive being configured as IDE but it didn't stay onscreen long enough for me to read it. (I also should have mentioned earlier that yesterday I tried to repair the boot.ini file (using instructions from a reputable website) but I found that there was nothing to fix - the entire file was missing! Anyway, I learned something new today. When simplifying your system (for troubleshooting purposes) by disconnecting HDs, it's not enough to disconnect just the data cables, you also have to disconnect the power cables as well. I think this is one reason why my system wasn't booting. I thought I'd hosed my entire system! One quick question before I try once again to boot from that 160GB HD. I visited what seemed like another reputable website: http://www.systweak.com/registrycleaner/2005/... . It recommended the installation of something they call 'Windows XP Repair Tool'. They claim it will fix many Windows problems. They also claim to be a 'Microsoft Partner' and that the program has had more than 110 million downloads. However, their site's also connected somehow with McAfee and I know from bitter experience just how buggy McAfee software can be. Can anyone recommend this tool as safe and effective?

Okay, I've found an old 500GB HD that checks out okay, that's never had an OS installed to it and still has plenty of room left on it. I've decided that, rather than go through what seems like a very complicated multi-boot repair/install, I'll just install WinXP from scratch and reinstall all my programs. I've just converted it to NTFS and are now going to remove all other HDs and hook this one up. Here's hoping I have no problems with this.

@ Ponch & jaclaz: Calm down guys, no need to fight here. I know exactly what jaclaz is talking about. He's referring to the option Windows has of "permanently" setting each drive (that is, volume) as one constant drive letter such that if you have, say, three external drives connected (denoted by, say, E:, F: & G:) and you disconnected the E: & F: drives, the third drive would stay at G: (IOW, it would not reset the drive letter down to E:). And I put 'permanently' in double-quotes because that is exactly how I had my system set up until sometime earlier last year (2013) when somehow it got changed (I have no idea how that happened, I sure didn't change it!). I have about 5 or 6 external HDs (together with 3 internal HDs) not all of which are connected at the same time (there were times when I had up to about 15 drive letters showing in FreeCommander at one time) and it was much easier keeping track of everything when the drive letters for everything never changed. Now they all get whatever letter Windows decides to give them depending on when I connect each one and I have to use their drive names to tell them apart. So, jaclaz, what you're saying is that Windows can boot from a volume that is lettered as something other than C:, even when that volume is on the same physical HD as the original boot volume. Nice. But on bootup my system tells me that my boot.ini file is invalid. Wouldn't this be a problem? How risky would it be to fix this file? More to the point, what part of my system is this file "attached" to? The BIOS? Windows (regardless of which instance is running)? The volume that Windows is installed onto (perhaps implying that each instance of Windows would use its own copy of boot.ini)?