Win XP Read Only Status

[Scott Shepherd]

I've got one that's kicking my butt right now. I'm the admin on an XP system we have and I've never had any issues with files. I have a directory where all of our graphics are stored. I recently got started on hooking up another XP computer to this one and I wanted to share a couple of files. It all goes through a DSL "router" that takes us to the internet.

There's another company that share the connection and everything has been fine, although I never got the files to share (ran out of time before I finished).

Someone from the other company comes in today, I heard them, then I happened to open my file explorer and noticed those two "shared" directories had a great big icon on them. I thought to myself "hey, he's looking at my files". I immediately went to my network connections and did everything possible to stop the sharing. He immediately gets up and leaves.

So then I notice the filename of the main folder has changed. I try to change it back and I can't get it to let me change the folder name back. I use System Restore to a point earlier in the day, and it seems to correct the folder issue, but now that folder and everything in it is marked as "Read Only". I click on the top directory and remove that setting and it asks if I want to change all the sub directories as well, I say "yes" and it takes off zinging. All good, I think. Open the properties back up, it's back to read only. No matter what I do, it keeps changing the status back to read only.

Any idea how to make that change stick?

I'm all up to date on virus protection and scans come up clean.

The guy who came in is not a malicious person. Nosey, but not malicious, so I can't imagine he did something. He was only in the office for about 3 5 minutes total and I'm sure he didn't drive to the office to damage my files or give me a virus.

Any ideas?

[Tom Veatch]

I assume this is an XP Pro system. Do you have "Use simple file sharing" enabled? (Tools/Folder Options/View tab) If you right click on the directory and open the Properties windo, do you see a "Security" tab?

[Lenny Howard]

I've got one that's kicking my butt right now. I'm the admin on an XP system we have and I've never had any issues with files. I have a directory where all of our graphics are stored. I recently got started on hooking up another XP computer to this one and I wanted to share a couple of files. It all goes through a DSL "router" that takes us to the internet.

There's another company that share the connection and everything has been fine, although I never got the files to share (ran out of time before I finished).

Someone from the other company comes in today, I heard them, then I happened to open my file explorer and noticed those two "shared" directories had a great big icon on them. I thought to myself "hey, he's looking at my files". I immediately went to my network connections and did everything possible to stop the sharing. He immediately gets up and leaves.

So then I notice the filename of the main folder has changed. I try to change it back and I can't get it to let me change the folder name back. I use System Restore to a point earlier in the day, and it seems to correct the folder issue, but now that folder and everything in it is marked as "Read Only". I click on the top directory and remove that setting and it asks if I want to change all the sub directories as well, I say "yes" and it takes off zinging. All good, I think. Open the properties back up, it's back to read only. No matter what I do, it keeps changing the status back to read only.

Any idea how to make that change stick?

I'm all up to date on virus protection and scans come up clean.

The guy who came in is not a malicious person. Nosey, but not malicious, so I can't imagine he did something. He was only in the office for about 3 5 minutes total and I'm sure he didn't drive to the office to damage my files or give me a virus.

Any ideas?

FWIW
I had a similar thing happen (not sure it's exactly the same though) when moving backed up files onto a new computer. In my case the files could not be accessed (displayed "access denied" error)
I had to "take ownership of files" as descibed here....
http://www.winxptutor.com/ownership.htm

Maybe someone else has a better soultion.

Good luck,

[Rich Engelhardt]

Hello,
Shell out to a command prompt.
change directories (folder) to the top level of the share:
ie: c:\share
type in :
attrib *. -r /s

It should reset the read only attribute on all the folders and the files inside.

As a side note, for some reason XP always reports folders as being read only, even if they aren't. Unchecking the read only box has no effect on folders. To reset the read only bit, you have to use the attrib command from a command prompt.
As mentioned earlier, you may have to take (or retake) ownership first.

[Scott Shepherd]

Thanks Guys, it appears to be all sorted out thanks to your help.