NTFS Folder has no owner, no permissions, can’t be deleted

ntfspermissions

I have a folder a 2003 member server which can't be deleted. Nothing has any permissions (domain admin and running up a cmd prompt as "nt authority\system" using psexec) – always "access denied".

When I do a dir /q, the owner shows as "…".

I've tried takeown.exe on the folder and also it's parent. The bad folder always reports "access denied". Also tried to reset using icacls, same thing.

Explorer permissions has no sharing & security options or tabs. It works fine for other folders, even in the same directory.

Best Answer

I've seen something similar to this. What ended up being the case is that the file was deleted while there were still outstanding locks on it. I couldn't do a darned thing to it. Clearing the outstanding locks caused the file to fully delete.

Related Solutions

Windows Server 2003 NTFS – How to Take Ownership of a Folder When Access is Denied and Security Tab is Missing

When I've seen this it was because a process was holding the folder open but the folder was in the process of being deleted. Use a tool like Process Explorer to see if anything has an open handle on the folder. I would guess that once you release it or reboot, that folder will disappear.

Windows – Force ownership of folder structure without replacing other permissions – Windows Server 2008 R2 – takeown is erasing all other permissions

Ended up achieving what I wanted with Setacl. I wrote the following script which ripped through the entire folder structure and files, and gave ownership to the local Administrators group, then went through again and added a full control ACE for our IT domain group. It did this without replacing or removing the existing permissions/ACEs (other than replacing the owner), and I didn't get any access denied errors:

setlocal

set logDir=%1
set targetDir=%2
set logFileName=%~n2
set logFileNameEnding=%3

SetACL.exe -on %targetDir% -ot file -actn setowner -ownr "n:S-1-5-32-544;s:y" -rec cont_obj -log "%logDir%\%logFileName%-TAKEOWN-%LogFileNameEnding%.txt" -silent

SetACL.exe -on %targetDir% -ot file -actn ace -ace "n:domain\group;p:full;s:n;m:set;w:dacl" -rec cont_obj -log "%logDir%\%logFileName%-ADD-DOMAIN-GROUP-%LogFileNameEnding%.txt" -silent

endlocal

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows Server 2003 NTFS – How to Take Ownership of a Folder When Access is Denied and Security Tab is Missing

Windows – Force ownership of folder structure without replacing other permissions – Windows Server 2008 R2 – takeown is erasing all other permissions

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