A few weeks ago the fan in my laptop (HP Pavilion dv6) died. I took my computer apart to test the fan, which had definitely burned out, and ordered a new fan.
In the meantime, there were files on my computer which I needed, so I connected the hard drive to a USB device which allows laptop hard drives to be used like USB external drives and connected this to my mom's computer (also an HP, but this one Windows 8). When I tried to access the drive, it said that I did not have permission to do so, so I attempted to take ownership of the drive and various folders.
I have been using a registry tool which adds a button to the context menu to claim ownership of a folder and its contents or a file.
I know it was stupid and I suspected there would be problems later on, but I needed the files.
When I put my computer back together, it started up out of hibernation like nothing had happened and worked perfectly. However, after rebooting it did a disk check, apparently deleting some registry items and emptying the recycle bin.
I found, after this, that some locations on my hard drive were now inaccessible to me and programs running on my computer.
Some programs have stopped working. Constant Guard, a necessary evil my dad installed on my computer to supposedly prevent viruses, mercifully forgot that I had a license for it, giving me a good excuse to uninstall it. Dropbox stopped synching with the servers. Microsoft Word no longer auto-saves, reporting an error every time it tries to do so with increasing frequency until the document is essentially unusable. Chrome stopped working entirely (would not start) and refused to be updated or uninstalled. I manually mangled out the installation until it would finally reinstall and now works fine. Torch, a derivative of Chrome, was not similarly affected. Python 3.2 quit working entirely, but works after upgrading to 3.4.
My question is this:
How can I claim ownership of every folder, sub-folder, and file on my drive or simply turn off file protection? What other issues may be causing these symptoms (registry corruption?) and how do I fix them?
Best Answer
The solution I eventually used was using the command line takeown command and, using some registry fiddling, putting it in the context menu, so I could right click on any folder and take ownership. I muddled through this way for about a year until the computer started bluescreening for no apparent reason. This is all to say, the following solution is a bad one and you should probably just reinstall the operating system instead: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-take-ownership-to-explorer-right-click-menu-in-vista/