Windows 10: Taking Ownership of Everything and Always Acting as an Administrator

I cannot do everything in the system, and it asks for confirmation when I delete some items in the Program Files folder or move some items there. Therefore, I need to know how to take ownership of everything every file and folder on the computer, so as to be able to edit, move, and delete every file with full rights.Can you also explain how to do everything always as an administrator, so as to have no restrictions and never receive any warning messages asking for confirmation?

:)

 

Take Ownership

Hello,

Thank you for posting your concern here in Microsoft Community and welcome to the Windows 10 Family.

From the description of the issue, I understand that you are unable to take full ownership of the files and folders.

I would recommend you to see if you are logged in administrator account, if not then enable it. Please follow the below steps.

I would suggest you to enable the built in administrator account.

You need to run the command from an elevated command prompt. To do that you need to do the following:

• Press the Windows key t+ R from the keyboard to open the Run Command Dialog Box
• Enter cmd and right-click on the Command Prompt result that should appear.
  
• This opens a list of options at the bottom. Select Run as administrator there.
  
• Accept the UAC prompt
• Enter the following command to enable the hidden administrator account:
  net user administrator /active:yes

Hope the above information was helpful. If you need further assistance, please do let us know and we would be happy to help you further.

Thank You.

 

How to "take ownership"?


I’ve found a small solution to hide the smiley icon. It doesn’t disable the button, it only renders the icon invisible.
This is what I did:

• Navigate to C:\Windows\System32 and find ieframe.dll
• Take ownership and give administrators full control
• ...snip...
• Save the file and copy it back to C:\Windows\System32

................

So, the question is how to take "control" - I seem to still be getting permission denied errors when copying the file back to c:\Windows\System32?

Okay so it seems that after taking ownership and giving adminstrators control, I got further - I had to also explicitly set the file permission. It did let me copy my modified .dll over the ieframe.dll, but now IE does not start up! Luckily I am running this in a VM so can revert to an earlier snapshot, but there does seem to be some fundamental step that I am missing!

 

Can't take ownership of external hard disk

Hi Jenil,

Welcome to the Microsoft community.

In order to assist you better could you please confirm a few things like:

• Have you installed any third party folder lock software on your computer?

I would suggest you to follow methods and check if it helps.

Method 1:

Step 1: Make sure that you are logged in as an administrator.

Step 2: Try to take ownership of the files and check if it helps.

Taking ownership of a folder from explorer

1) Locate the file or folder on which you want to take ownership in windows explorer.

2) Right click on file or folder and select “Properties” from Context Menu.

3) Click on "Security" tab.

4) Click on “Advanced” button.

5) Now click on "Owner" tab in Advanced Security Settings for User windows.

6) Click on Edit Button and select user from given Change Owner to list if user or group is not in given list.

7) Click on other users or groups. Enter name of user/group and click ok.

8) Now select User/group and click apply and ok. Check “Replace owner on subcontainers and objects” if you have files and folder within selected folder.

9) Click ok when Windows Security Prompt is displayed.

10) Now Owner name must have changed.

11) Now click Ok to exist from Properties windows.

Once you have taken the ownership of file or folder next part comes is granting permissions to that file/folder or object.

If the above method doesn’t work, you could try taking ownership from the command line.

Or Taking ownership of a file or folder from command line

Open an elevated Command Prompt window.

To do so:

a. press windows + X.

b. Select Command Prompt as Administrator.

c. Type the following command and press ENTER:

takeown /f <foldername> /r /d y

d. To assign the Administrators group Full Control Permissions for the folder, use this syntax:

icacls <foldername> /grant administrators:F /T

The /T parameter is added so that the operation is carried out through all the sub-directories and files within that folder.

e. To know more information about the above commands, run these commands from a Command Prompt window.

takeown /?

icacls /?

Once you take ownership, you can grant permissions on those files or folders.

Method 2:

Try the steps in the following Microsoft article.

Windows help & learning - Microsoft Support

Chkdsk disclaimer.

Important: While performing chkdsk on the hard drive if any bad sectors are found on the hard drive when chkdsk tries to repair that sector if any data available on that might be lost.

Hope this information was helpful and do let us know if you need further assistance. WE will be glad to assist.