WinXP filesystem issues:security, permissions, ownership etc

[Han]

I'm sure you are aware that Win98 should be in C: and it has to be on Fat32 or lower. Also it cannot access NTFS if you have any paritions in that format.

With NTFS for Windows 98 you can read NTFS...

[treemana]

With NTFS for Windows 98 you can read NTFS...

I didn't know about this either. Thanks for the useful information.

[integspec]

Thanks for the suggestion Han, another valuable tool from Winternals Arsenal. I think those two guys from Winternals must be the brightest Win32 hackers around. I have used the Admin pack to bootup couple of dead NT machines and successfully recoverd the data.

[Han]

Another essential site for Windows NT platform:

Windows NT / Windows 2000 / Windows XP / Windows Server 2003 Tips and Tricks

[robertb]

Hi
My suggestion to put your XP pro CD in the drive and reboot was because I would expect the XP pro to be a bootable CD.
At the re-boot it should ask you to press any key if you want to boot from the CD.(your bios needs to be setup to boot from CD first then Hard Drive )
Now at this point you are into the computer below the XP operating system and you should not have any trouble formatting your E: drive or any other drive but don't forget you are about to wipe your operating system away once you format .
Regarding NTFS wouldn't it be better to format your drive as FAT 32 and get away from NTFS particularly if you want to dual boot with WIN 98
You can break your hard drive up in to at least four primary partitions before you install an operating system if you want to and usually most experts seem to reccommend installing win 98 first on the first partition and then XP.
I experimented with this a few months back and the description would be too lengthy to post but a detailed description may be found here
http://www.duxcw.com/digest/Howto/softw ... index.html
My short version is here but you really need to spend a couple of days reading this up
And you need to have a good win 98 boot disk ready that will let you SEE/access your CD rom drive.
The above link tells you what you want on the boot disk and it should include smartdrv.exe
It also helps to work with just one hard drive plugged in as the master until you are finished with the win98 xp install. It avoids uneccessary confusion of drive letters.
1.) Get rid of all your partitions on the target drive. Try and download and use your drive manufacturers utilities to do it if it is a drive over 30 gb because fdisk is not too happy with hard-drives over 30 gb.
2.) Format the whole drive as fat 32
3.}create new partitions lets say three to start with . One for win98 one for xp and one for storage and set the size of each partion. Win 98 about 5gb and xp abou 10gb ??
4.)Format each partion and GIVE THEM A NAME
5.)Make folders c:\windows\options\cabs as instucted on the above link and copy everything in Win98 into the cabs folder.
6.)run setup /ie from the cabs folder. This will install win 98 onto drive c:
7.)Win 98 is installed and you can now install xp in different ways onto the second partiton which will be D:
Either from the xp pro bootable cd itself which will take the show over at boot or from a win98 floppy in A; drive . If you use the floppy in the A:\ drive you run the command smartdrv.exe followed by D:\i386\winnt.exe where d: is your cd rom drive with the xp cd on it.This will start the XP setup and copy setup files from the XP CD to your hard drive.
AAAAAAAAAAAH why did I start trying to write this I will be old before I finish.
Now important points WIN XP usually takes over now because it can see win 98 is there and you should finish up about an hour later when you boot up with the option to boot into XP or Win 98 from an XP type bootscreen.
There are utilities to create multiple operating systems and multiple primary partions and I tried several of them. One in particular is absolutely fantastic called BOOTITNG
from here http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/
This program will go on a floppy disk and puts norton ghost , Acronis O/S selector and Partition Magic to shame.I would reccommend installing bootitng immediately after you put win98 in and before you put XP in. By doing this it will hide Win 98 partion from XP and vice versa. Also by putting bootitng in you can create up to 200 primary partitons and add further operating systems with ease. resize partions, copy partions , move partions , delete partions, format partions , boot from 2 hard drives , boot several operating sysytems from 2 hard drives.... I tried this program and I can really vouch for it
If I am not too late it would not be a bad idea to download the demo and experiment with it before you start
Size of the demo program is only about 1.4 megabyte and I think it is fully operational
good luck

[integspec]

Robertb,

I thought I /will grow old before I could finish reading your explanation. (somewhat old already anyways ). It's pretty descreptive and thanks also for the links.

Regarding Bootit NG, can it do parition imaging? if yes how has been your experience with it? The reasons I ask is, every six odd months I reinstall XP and apps in my sys in whole . So I'm planning to image the whole OS partition to a DVD RW. (When it was Win98 I could image the whole OS with installed apps in a cd with Norton Ghost but XP is bigger still my Liteon 411 can handle it). One feature I'm looking for is complete image of partition with selective file exclusion. But to prevent inconsistencies, AFAIK none of the imaging apps allow this.

Thanks a lot.

[robertb]

Yes Bootitng can deal with imaging and it can deal with xp and the images produced are about half the size of the original target drive. It even has some sort of facility to correct xp tendency to try and change the partition drive letter when you re-install.
Alternatively I believe you can produce just a straight full size drive to drive copy (can't think why ?) but I only tried saving and restoring images.
It is a really handy tool to take a clean image of say a new Windows 98 installation just after you have installed your e-mail , printer , scanner and various other bits. Then if you are a bit unhappy with say a slightly buggy program after a month or two you just write your saved image of win98 back to the same partition in about 2 or 3 minutes instead of slugging through a 30 minute installation.
In the case of XP images it is usually simpler to write your saved image back to the same partition from whence it came since XP can do it's best to be a pain sometimes by trying to change drive letters and also trying to change the boot.ini file. But once again restoring an imade of XP only takes about 7 or 8 minutes (on a pentium 2 350 MHZ computer) as opposed to about 1 hour at least for an XP full installation.
Bootitng contains a bootmanager as well as these imaging facilities but the site also contains a free demo of two tiny programs Winimage and Winimage for dos which are not bootmanager programs and just handle the imaging job.
On bootitng it is worth spending a day or two reading the help notes supplied on their site.
The bootitng program installs easily and comes out easily and I found it very un-intrusive if you want to change and try another program
Finally as I can see grey hairs starting to appear again it is always worth keeping one drive as a storage drive which is visible to all drives but otherwise to always hide every operating system from every other operating system (particularly in the case of XP) since XP only needs a glimpse of Win98 and it will overwrite the win98 MBR and change drive letters etc. Now if you dump your saved image file into your visible storage drive you can boot into any drive and comfortably write your image to a CD-RW
Give it a try it is a small download
cheers

[dodecahedron]

hi robertb.
thanks for all the explanations and help.

i'll check out the link you gave. unfortunately i don't have 2 days to read all of it (now anyway)...
the highest priority is installing WinXP since i need some .doc and .pdf files for work.

what i really want is a triple boot:
Win98
WinXP
Linux.

i'll also consider BooItNG.
do you know if the download (which, if i understand rightly, is a 30 day trial) is limited somehow? couldn't find any info on this on the website.

[dodecahedron]

hi.

again i'm in need of file system help.

after recovering (thanks to you guys) My Documents, there are a few particular files i can't get at.
in the folder E:\Documents and Settings\oldusername\My Documents\My Pictures\CDRLabs\DMA 2K FAQ i have 18 graphic files, 9 images in .bmp and .png. yet you guessed it right, these are the pictures of my How to enable DMA in Windows 2000 (with pictures) FAQ.
for some reason the 9 .bmp files i can't get at, when i try to open/copy/compare i get a "Access to XXXX denied" error.

in Security settings, both the currnet user i'm using and the SYSTEM group have full permissions, the owner is Administrators group (of which current user is a member of), and playing with that didn't help.

of all the thousands of files i have, just these CDRLabs related files i can't get at !!!!!! does this mean anything???

[cfitz]

of all the thousands of files i have, just these CDRLabs related files i can't get at !!!!!! does this mean anything???

Yes. It means you should have your membership in CDRLabs revoked, because any good CDRLabs member would have these files backed up on optical media and wouldn't be concerned that he can't access them on his hard disc.

What is the full error message you are getting? Are any "deny" checkboxes marked in the security tab? "Deny" permissions take precedence over "Allow". Did you try removing all permissions and then resetting them to your desired permissions?

If worse comes to worse, you can just download the .png files from the FAQ to replace the .bmp files.

cfitz

[robertb]

hi
regarding bootit ng
As far as I can remember the demo version was not limited in any way.
Included in the Bootit ng download are instructions to produce a quick bootable floppy or a bootable CD which is how the bootit ng program is installed when you re-boot.
An installation wizard guides you through installation and it is recommended that you allow one primary partition just for bootit ng to reside. Sice Windows limits you to 4 primary partitions and you want to put three operating systems on (by the way it can handle the three mentioned) then you are best to select the option NOT to limit primary partitions. This means that Bootit NG takes over the whole show and will allow you up to 200 primary partitions.This is the best option.
Once it is installed whenever you reboot you will see a menu of the installed operating systems and you choose which one to boot into. Alternatively you select the option "Maintenance" from the menu to make changes or add a new op system.
If for example you already have win 98 installed aand you want to install XP then at re-boot you select "maintenance" and under "Partition work" you create your second partion (if you haven't set one up already) and format it. Then you go to "Boot menu" and instruct to boot to the new EMPTY partition. You can test you have it right because if you re-boot to an empty partition you should get a message "Non system disk"
OK put your bootable XP Pro CD in the drive re-boot again and follow installation instructions.
After XP is installed the bootit ng menu may disappear and you may have an XP boot menu. XP should boot normally but your already installed Win98 may not because it had been hidden from XP by the Bootit ng program. So you just put the Bootit ng floppy back in , re-boot and follow instructions to allow bootit ng to take back control from XP. You will have to go into the boot menu and add XP as your second item in the boot menu.
I have tried Partition Magic , System Commander and Bootstar but found them all OK until XP became involved or until I wished to install a second operating system onto a second hard drive.
I have not tried the Linux combination but it is stated that it can handle it and I would imagine that it can.I did try the combination Win98 WinXP and Red Hat Linux with Partion Magic and did not succeed. I didn't bother any more because I couldn't think what to do with Linux anyway.
Hmmm I'm getting verbal diarrhoea lately so had better stop now

[dodecahedron]

of all the thousands of files i have, just these CDRLabs related files i can't get at !!!!!! does this mean anything???

Yes. It means you should have your membership in CDRLabs revoked, because any good CDRLabs member would have these files backed up on optical media and wouldn't be concerned that he can't access them on his hard disc.

What is the full error message you are getting? Are any "deny" checkboxes marked in the security tab? "Deny" permissions take precedence over "Allow". Did you try removing all permissions and then resetting them to your desired permissions?

If worse comes to worse, you can just download the .png files from the FAQ to replace the .bmp files.

like i said in the first sentence in this topic, i'm a jackass.
i'm not a complete moron, however!

i do have those files backed up:
on a CDRW copy i made a week before "the mess"
on the other hard drive (the FAT32 partition), backup made a week and a half before.
on CD backups (older - a month or so? but these files are very old so it doesn't matter), these CDs are both in my closet and at my mom's.
on the fileserver where they are fetched from when you read the FAQ!

so PLEASE OH PLEASE do not revoke my CDRLabs membership

it's just that i made another copy to the FAT32 drive, and they won't copy, and this surprised and annoyed me.

when i try to open these .bmp file with MS Paint i get:Access to D:
Documents and Settings\...\2K_MyComputer-Properties.bmp was denied..
all these files: Properties->Security, all Allow checkboxes are checked (except for Special Permissions which is not), all Deny are unchecked (already checked that,i did learn somethingn from this thread, but did forget to write this in my previous post).

i can't change the permissions (uncheck the Allow boxes) and then set them again, because all the Allow checkboxes are (checked and) greyed out.

any more ideas? i'm stumped!

[dodecahedron]

thanks robertb again.
sounds like it will work with Linux too.
kind of a shame it takes over everything, i liked the Linux boot manager (it "takes over" the Windows one and lets you choose from the various Windowses you have and Linux of course) but it's not a big deal.

[cfitz]

i can't change the permissions (uncheck the Allow boxes) and then set them again, because all the Allow checkboxes are (checked and) greyed out.

That's because you have "Allow inheritable permissions from parent to propagate to this object" checked. Uncheck this, and you can set permissions at will.

Just for fun, click the "Advanced" button, then the "Effective Permissions" tab. Select the user you are logged in as, see what the effective permissions on the file are.

Also, do you have the problem for all the files in this folder, or just the .bmp files? Can you write a new file to the folder and then access it?

cfitz

[dodecahedron]

no, the problem was only for the 9 .bmp files, not for the 9 .png files!

i did manage to uncheck and then re-check the Allow boxes, that didn't help.

OK problem solved.
i hadn't noticed before, but the list of Group or user names box contained SYSTEM group and a user S-1-15-<lots of digits> (wtf is this?) which i had assumed was the current user i'm logged as.

changed to Administrators group (which is the owner, what is listed in this box, for all other files in this errant My Documents) and there for Administrators, in the Advance tab i checked the box Replace permissions entries on all child objects...
no everything is OK.

strange that this ownership and security issue had occured only for these 9 files (out of thousands) and only for all the 9 .bmp files but not the others in the same folder!

thanks cfitz for (again ) pointing me in the right direction.

[cfitz]

i hadn't noticed before, but the list of Group or user names box contained SYSTEM group and a user S-1-15-<lots of digits> (wtf is this?) which i had assumed was the current user i'm logged as.

Aha! So you lied to us. You weren't logged on as the user who has permissions to the file, nor were you logged in as a member of the administrators group. It becomes a little less mysterious when you reveal this new information...

The S-1-15... stuff is the identifier of your old user before the XP re-installation fiasco. That user no longer exists, so XP can't map the identifier to a user-friendly name.

Why just the .bmp files? Presumably it has something to do with the user and group you were logged in as when you captured the screen shots. Were you a different user when you were editing them and converting them to .png? Or did you copy them from somewhere else as a different user? Oh well, it isn't too important now.

By the way, there are two basic causes of being denied access to a file. One, that you are now intimately familiar with, is that security access rights don't allow acces to the user you are logged in as. The second is that another process has the file open with exclusive access. If you have a problem of the second type, you can use Process Explorer over at Sysinternals to find the offending process.

cfitz

[dodecahedron]

i probably did make a mistake (no deliberat lie!)
i was logged in as newusername, which is a member of the Adminstrators group!
however Administrators group did not have permissions to those files, that is true.
it was an oversight, since all other files worked fine!
as for the S-1-15.... i don't know what that is, but even before the "crash" i've seen these codes all over the registry, i assume it's some form of "coding" of usernames inside windows. i had presumed it was the same as newusername, but must've been wrong.

now thinking it over, you're right.
when checking a file that is not inside oldusername's Documents and Settings folder (whose ownership i had changed earlier to fix the problem), but another file on the hard drive that was there before the crash, i do see the same S-1-15.... with a small picture of a head next to it but it has a small Question mark on it. so i guess you're right, inside the Security tabs i shouldn't see such S-1-15.. codes, and the reason i am seeing them is the reason you gave.

still, it's strange. when i changed ownership of oldusername's Documents and Settings, including all subfolder/subfiles, why wheren't the changes applied to these 9 files? (hence the current problem i had) so it's not only my fault!