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Under Windows XP I never touched the permissions of a file/folder. I was happy with the way it worked. But recently I installed Windows 7 on a drive that previously hosted Windows XP (I installed over XP - XP is now gone). Now, some programs do not have 'read' and/or 'write' access to their own folders - and I am not talking about system folders like 'Program Files' but normal folders like 'C:\my data\my own folder\program folder'.

I see that for folders created under Windows XP I have some user groups that do not exist for 'normal' folders (folders created by me recently under Windows 7).

For example, for the Windows XP folder I have:

Creator owner
System
Account unknown(S-1-5-21 blablabla...
Admins
Users

For Windows 7 folders I have:

Authenticated users
System
Admins
Users

How should I proceed?

Many thanks.

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  • Can you be a bit clearer about what you have done here, ie was this an XP install on a disk and you have now moved the disk to a Windows 7 machine, or did you do an in-place upgrade of XP to 7? You list a bunch of account groups, but you don't say if they hiave read, write, full control etc. so it's not clear what the actual problem is.
    – AdamV
    Jun 1, 2010 at 9:24
  • I installed Windows 7 on a drive that previously hosted Windows XP (I installed over XP - XP is now gone)
    – IceCold
    Jun 1, 2010 at 9:54
  • I would recommend any reader coming here to have a look at an answer to How would I use Takeown to take ownership of all folders on one drive?. Jul 25, 2022 at 17:01

2 Answers 2

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The "Account unknown" is an access-control list (ACL) entry that refers to an account by its security identifier (SID), but Windows can't find the account in the current list of users. Most likely this was an account on your XP system which you created but has not been re-created under Windows 7. The only place you can remove it is on the folder permissions wherever it appears, but there's no real need to, it's not doing any harm.

If you created a folder under XP using a user account that no longer exists, and you did not give access to any other users or groups, then you won't have access now. Using an admin account, take ownership of the folder, then change the access permissions to whatever makes sense - this might be all users or just one specific new account.

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  • > this might be all users or just one specific new account - How do I add an 'Authenticated users' group to this folder? I think this will be the best solution. Right?
    – IceCold
    Jun 1, 2010 at 10:01
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Easy solution:

Rename folder than makes problem. Create new folder with the original name. Move files from old folder to new folder.

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