Cannot access C drive!

[ninen2001]

I wanted to accees some files in C so i went in to Security and removed SYSTEM and all the other accounts except for my admin account. And now when i try to open C drive is says "C:\ is not accessible. Access denied. What am i gonna do!?

 

[teddymines]

One option is to boot to a linux live CD or thumb drive, and then access your drive from there. I did this to copy a bunch of files that had broken permissions to an external hard drive, and those permissions did not get copied along, which is what I wanted. Then I booted to Windows 7 and was able to get the files off the external drive.

 

[dannylivesforher]

Well,I'm not totally sure this will do the trick,but you could give it a try. Go to drive properties,Security tab and click Advanced button at the bottom. Then in the next window that appears,look in the 'Permission Entries'. On the left to your admin account,look below the 'Type' and see if it is 'Allow' and under the 'Permission',look if it is 'Full Control'. If it's not that way,click on 'Change Permissions' button.On the next screen,select your admin account and click Edit.Then,enable all the permissions and click OK. Then it will come back to the previous window. There,you'll see an option,'Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object',select it ( I did this when I was denied permission to folders in my drive). Then click OK. Then on the next window,click Apply---> OK. Again,on the properties window,click OK.
Now see if you can access the drive.

Update: Even if the permission is 'Allow',you could try that 'Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object' option. It may work.
N.B: While changing these settings,and applying,it may say,settings can't be applied to some files,and they are not accessible. Skip those files and apply to the rest.

 

[ninen2001]

Well,I'm not totally sure this will do the trick,but you could give it a try. Go to drive properties,Security tab and click Advanced button at the bottom. Then in the next window that appears,look in the 'Permission Entries'. On the left to your admin account,look below the 'Type' and see if it is 'Allow' and under the 'Permission',look if it is 'Full Control'. If it's not that way,click on 'Change Permissions' button.On the next screen,select your admin account and click Edit.Then,enable all the permissions and click OK. Then it will come back to the previous window. There,you'll see an option,'Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object',select it ( I did this when I was denied permission to folders in my drive). Then click OK. Then on the next window,click Apply---> OK. Again,on the properties window,click OK.
Now see if you can access the drive.

Update: Even if the permission is 'Allow',you could try that 'Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object' option. It may work.
N.B: While changing these settings,and applying,it may say,settings can't be applied to some files,and they are not accessible. Skip those files and apply to the rest.

It didn't work

 

[ninen2001]

One option is to boot to a linux live CD or thumb drive, and then access your drive from there. I did this to copy a bunch of files that had broken permissions to an external hard drive, and those permissions did not get copied along, which is what I wanted. Then I booted to Windows 7 and was able to get the files off the external drive.

But i want to have access running Windows!

 

[teddymines]

One option is to boot to a linux live CD or thumb drive, and then access your drive from there. I did this to copy a bunch of files that had broken permissions to an external hard drive, and those permissions did not get copied along, which is what I wanted. Then I booted to Windows 7 and was able to get the files off the external drive.

But i want to have access running Windows!

Maybe I'm not understanding your problem. If you copy the files off your C drive using the method I describe, the permissions do not get carried over as part of the copy. Then you delete the ones off your C drive, and restore from the external drive. Those files being restored will not have the ACL attributes, so they will be owned by which ever user you used to copy them back.