Windows – Unable to Change Windows Vista Read-Only Folder Attribute

permissionswindowswindows 7windows-vista

Windows Vista and 7 use the read-only attribute of folders to also indicate that the folder is 'custom.'

It turns out that this is preventing programs I use from updating files in my documents folder. I am unable to change the read-only setting regardless of whether I right-click on the folder and de-select the read-only checkbox on the properties tab, or if I use the 'icacls' command from the command line.

This has been discussed before by me and others here:

However, none of these solutions are working for me.

Has anyone heard of a workaround or solution outside of these links? Really, all I want to be able to do is use Maven for a software project I'm developing; but my IDE stack (Netbeans 7 & Glassfish 3.x) can't update my project file in my documents folder… So at the moment I'm stuck using Ant, but I'd really prefer to migrate to Maven.

Here are some links discussing this:

Best Answer

Start registery editor (regedit.exe) go to the folowing registery key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer

Choose in the menu

edit ->new

and then -> DWORD value with registervalue word

UseSystemForSystemFolders

click with the right mouse on the new value and click on change Type 1 and click OK Close Regedit then you need to do the attrib -r +s c:\test (where c:\test) is your folder

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