I’ve recently installed Windows 7 on my desktop and I’m trying to migrate files from the laptop’s hard disk.

Whenever I try to copy files from a folder that I do not have permissions to, it asks me if I want to gain “permanent access” to the folder and its contents, which means to alter the folder permissions to take ownership of the folder & files. Why would I want to do that? After the folder is copied to the new user, I would still need to alter the permissions for that user again anyway, which means the permissions are altered twice. Altering permissions on a directory tree is no fast operation either. This problem is also detailed here by sbalfour.

After following some links, the solution is to use the real Administrator account, which needs to be activated first using the following command line. You need to launch the Command Prompt using “run as administrator”.

net user Administrator /active

After the command completes, simply logout and login using the newly activated Administrator account and you can move the files around without being forced to take ownership of the folder & files.