Take ownership of a file that used to be owned by a domain account

The easiest way to do this is to launch Powershell with administration tokens. To do this, you right click on Powershell (or a shortcut to it) and click on "run as administrator". Alternatively you can use elevate.cmd.

Update: This GP setting is no longer available starting with Vista/Server 2008. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/947721

A Group Policy setting is not available in the security policy settings list on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008

SYMPTOMS

When you try to access the "System objects: Default owner for objects created by members of the Administrators group" Group Policy setting on a computer that is running Windows Vista or newer, this setting is not available in the security policy settings list. When the setting is present in your security group policy, it will be ignored by Windows Vista and newer domain members.

CAUSE

Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 do not support this setting any longer. When enabled, User Account Control (UAC) will ensure the user account is being used as owner for all objects created locally. For remote access, the administrators group will be used there is no restricted token for network sessions.

Since the support for the setting was removed, the system security policy "System objects: Default owner for objects created by members of the Administrators group" setting is not available in the Security Templates user interface anymore.

Have a look in Group Policy for the setting "System objects: Default owner for objects created by members of the Administrators group". It's located under:

• Computer Configuration
  • Windows Settings
    • Security Settings
      • Local Policies
        • Security Options

When this setting is enabled members of the "Administrators" group will have objects they create set with the owner "Administrators".

To be honest, I'm not immediately sure on Microsoft's rationale for this behaviour, except to say that it would allow for a common ability to reset permissions on objects w/o taking ownership by all "Administrators". I'd guess that was the intent. I'd be interested to see if anybody has a link to an explicit statement of purpose on this setting from Microsoft.

I noticed that this setting's default differs between Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (here's an article from Microsoft on it http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318825), but I still don't see a statement of purpose behind why you would want things set one way versus the other.