Resetting NTFS Permissions in 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:

1. Run “cmd” as Administrator
2. Go to the drive or folder in question, for example:
   cd i:
3. 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.