Someone messed up majorly in setting permissions on an NTFS drive and I'm looking at a way to reset all permissions to default. The OS will be reinstalled but I'm trying to salvage data from their user directories.
None of the data is encrypted at an FS level.
Any recommendation on how to achieve that?
Best Answer
If you're talking about a disk that doesn't contain a Windows installation, just use the "TAKEOWN" and "ICACLS" utilities:
Then you can reset the ACLs to whatever you want.
If it's a disk with a Windows 2000, XP, or Server 2003 operating system installed (don't know about Vista on this one) you could try re-applying the default security template:
(On a Windows Server install, substitute "defltsv.inf" for "defltwk.inf".)