ntfs - Unable to Change Windows 8 Read-Only Folder Attribute

08
2014-07
  • daboss42

    Windows 8 Enterprise x64, not joined to a domain or ever has been. Possibly coincidentally, after installing Skyrim (Thanks Steam sales!),I could not access a file on my internal secondary drive "K:\" that I actually created earlier called "Temp". Error msg: "K:\Temp is not accessible access is denied" (K: is formatted with NTFS) so I launched cmd as admin (I am the local administrator): "attrib -r k:\temp" and access denied. Tried This to no effect. Any ideas?

    Thanks for reading

    • Answers
    Know someone who can answer? Share a link to this question via email, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

    Related Question

    ntfs - Strange 'My Documents' Folder behavior after aborted upgrade to Windows Vista
  • Aric TenEyck

    My main computer is a Windows XP machine, and I've had it for a few years. I've been holding out for Windows 7, but a few months ago, the hard drive started failing and I needed to replace it. Rather than truly replace it, I dug up an old 30G hard drive and decided to reinstall onto it, putting all of my data onto a separate drive in the computer.

    I had a Windows Vista install disk from the Visual Studio launch event, so I decided to go ahead and try it. The install went fine. I had a directory called "D:\My Documents" and I told Vista to use that as my "My Documents" directory.

    After a couple of weeks, repeated system crashes and Microsoft's takedown of the web site that they set up to allow those of us with the VS Vista discs to get registration keys, I gave up and went back to Windows XP. I formatted the C: drive and installed XP on it.

    Once this was done, I went to access a file in my D:\My Documents directory. After a brief moment of panic on discovering that it was gone, I discovered that no, it had been renamed (presumably by Vista) to "Aric's Documents".

    I selected it, hit "F2", and renamed it to "My Documents". Explorer took the change, but then it continued to show as "Aric's Documents" in the folder window. I hit F2 again, and again typed "My Documents". Note that I have not yet marked it as a special system folder, XP still thinks that c:\documents and settings\whatever is where I'm keeping my documents.

    I tried right-click->Rename, and when I did that, the rename dialog that came up showed that the folder was already called "My Documents". When I double click on it, "D:\My Documents" shows up in the title bar.

    However, despite all of this (including reboots and the like), it still shows up as "Aric's Documents" when viewing the folder in explorer. How can I rename it?


    • Related Answers
  • Avey

    From a command prompt is the folder named My Documents or Aric's Documents?

    Maybe this is a simple solution: Create a new folder named My Documents on D:, change target of My Documents in XP then move the data over?

    Edit: If you open the desktop.ini file in that folder what does it say? it's a hidden system file. I'm wondering if the PersonalizedName is set to Aric's Documents.

    It should Look like this:

    [DeleteOnCopy]
    Owner=username
    Personalized=5
    PersonalizedName=My Documents

  • Chris

    From my understanding, when Windows is looking for a user's folder, it goes under 'Document and Settings' and then looks for the logged in computer user's directory. It seems that your installation of Windows is looking directly at the folder rather than thinking it's under 'Document and Settings'.