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I am a member of the administrator's group on my company's machine, logged into the domain. I can't delete, write to or make any kind of changes to a USB flash drive. Error message is "You require permission from domain\user to make changes to this file. 'domain\user' are generic terms here and it's me. I took ownership of the drive and replaced ownership tree for all the objects. It didn't help. I did the same thing under the local administrator account.

The only way I can write to the drive is by logging in as the local administrator. I can see that the owner of any object is myself.

Any ideas why I can't make changes to the drive? Is there a group policy that might prevent me from writing to the drive?

Update:
Results of icacls X:\ /save
D:PAI(A;OICI;FA;;;WD)(A;OICI;FA;;;BU)

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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With Windows Vista and newer Administrator users do not have administrator privileges unless you go through a UAC prompt. Because of this when you assign the Administrators group to the drive you don't actually count twoard it in normal use of Windows.

Open the security tab for the drive, edit the settings, and add the USERS group. On that group give them "Full Control" permissions of the external drive. This will allow all users, not just administrators read and write to the drive.

If it still does not work it is also possible that some user or group that affects you has "Deny" permissions set on something. "Deny" permissions override any "Allow" permissions and the only way to get past them is be a local administrator.

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    The Everyone group already has Full Access permission. I haven't encountered before a computer where I couldn't write to a USB drive and I was always a member of the admin group. There are no deny permissions. I added the Users group with full control and it didn't help. By default administrators group members have full control to any drive. What is showing now is Everyone and Users groups and they both have full control permission.
    – Tony_Henrich
    Jun 17, 2016 at 1:37
  • @Tony_Henrich Do icacls X:\ /save perms.txt and replace X: with the drive of the external and post the content of the perms.txt file it creates as a edit of your question.
    – Scott Chamberlain
    Jun 17, 2016 at 2:23
  • I added an update
    – Tony_Henrich
    Jun 17, 2016 at 16:11
  • @Tony_Henrich everything looks correct in the security descriptor. You have "Full control" permissions for the "Users" group and the "Everyone" and they are set to be auto inherited by any children. I don't know what would cause your problems. The only other idea i have is logged in as the local administrator that works, from a elevated command line, do a icacls X:\ /reset /T which will reset all permissions recursively for the `X:` root directory and all files in it.
    – Scott Chamberlain
    Jun 17, 2016 at 18:37
  • I got an error from that syntax so I used icacls * /reset /T after cd'ing to that drive. It didn't help. I also changed ownership to the Admins group. The machine is using McAfee. Maybe there's a rule to prevent users from using external drives.
    – Tony_Henrich
    Jun 17, 2016 at 22:05

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