Windows Permissions in PE

[Moose]

We use PE in our data migration process here and until yesterday I thought the native operating systems permissions were ignored when booted with PE. We were having an issue on one migration where we could not copy files off the machine and after changing the permissions in the native OS (Windows 2000) the copy proceeded without error. Is this a fluke or does PE actually look at permissions? Any help is appreciated.

[The008]

yep, this happens 'cause WinPE is just Windows XP, but "portable". So when you protect a folder from view, it's common that other users can't view this folder, so does WinPE. WinPE is based on Windows XP and now Windows Vista operating systems, so it would work just like those operating systems, and it's true 'cause you can customize your WinPE/BartPE to work just like your Windows XP, importing apps and tweaks, everything works.

[allen2]

First PE is for preinstallation environnement Nothing to do with portable when you're speaking about winpe or bartpe. For .exe, pe means portable executable.

Second, you simply encountered a rights problem because when using PE, you're using the system account and then you have all system account rights. But sometimes people remove or deny the read rights to the system account and then when you try to copy data protected like this with a PE CD, you have to take the ownership and reset the permissions.

[Moose]

Thanks for your help. The system account was the problem. The files in question were his blackberry backups and had only assigned his specific user rights, no system or administrators were listed on those files. So we implemented a change in our migration scripts to run cacls first and add system rights at the root then propagate those rights down through the drive to prevent this from happening again.