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After reinstalling Windows, I now don't have permissions for my own files.

Anonymous
2023-09-05T19:41:46+00:00

I have reinstalled Windows (using 10 Home Edition) by moving it from a 120GB SSD to a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD. This is because the 120GB kept getting so full that it was causing Windows to crash a lot, and I found it a pain to manage the files every few days to keep Windows from crashing.

I did this by making a boot drive with an external USB hard drive.

Now my old disk drives are inaccessible because of a lack of permissions. There are some files which I can access, but some folders which Windows won't allow me to even open, despite being the only user account (which is an admin account) on the computer. I am using the same Microsoft email address for the same Windows account, so I am at a loss.

I did have to rename my computer which was frustrating, so maybe that had something to do with it?

And there's a disk drive which is entirely inaccessible which Windows has named System Reserved, which I'm not sure if it's an actual disk or if it's some strange partition I didn't ask Windows to make. This wasn't there before and it would be nice if I could tidy it up and get rid of it from File Explorer.

This comes up, but if I go to the security tab, and find my username, it then comes up as an unknown account with an incredibly long alphanumeric string.

Since I have been trying some things this evening, Windows now seems to have corrupted audio, and the error messages are popping up with some kind of distorted mess of noise out of an indie horror game.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-09-06T07:47:30+00:00

    Hello Superginge,

    Welcome to Microsoft Community.

    From your description, can I understand that this 120GB SSD used to be the system disk of the device, but now you have reinstalled the system in a new 2TB SSD via USB installation media.

    If this is the case, this 120GB SSD may be based on the protection of the system, resulting in you not being able to directly access the folders on this hard drive. I'm going to share a process here to try and change the owner of the SSD in order to get the permissions back, hopefully this will help you:

    1. Click the "Security TAB".
    2. At this time, the "Folder Properties" window will be opened, switch to the "Security" TAB, and click the "Advanced" button below to enter.
    3. After entering the "Advanced Security Settings" interface, click the "Change" button to the right of "Owner".
    4. At this time, the "Select users and groups" window will be opened, enter "everyone" here, then click the "detect name" button, and finally click "OK".
    5. From the returned "Advanced security Settings" window, you will find that the "owner" has changed, and check the "Replace the owner of the child container and object" item, click the "OK" button.
    6. At this time, a pop-up window will prompt "Change ownership", and change the ownership of all objects in the current folder.
    7. when the ownership of the folder has been changed, you should theoretically be able to open and access all the contents of the hard disk normally at this time, because the access rights have been re-granted.

    If you encounter problems with one of these steps, please provide a screenshot so that I can continue our discussion.

    Best regards,

    Mitchell - | Microsoft community support expert from MSFT

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