We all do it. I mean, it’s not really a choice is it? It’s just something that has to be done more frequently than changing socks.
I’m of course talking about reinstalling Windows. Because, man, is this a totally non-hardened OS or what? You can go to one ad-powered website and get a whole slew of issues that will sit on you system partition for as long as you don’t do that reinstall. So you do it. You do the reinstall. And everything feels so much better; Things are snappier, all of a sudden you have your system drive storage space back, and still all the rest of the files on a separate drive since 2006, because you remember that time when you reinstalled and you naively put everything on one single huge drive… Everything got erased.
And now you’re trying to install Cygwin and get some projects going. Maybe try to clone a git project from your home controlled server. And then…. Permission denied, said Bill. Access Denied, said Bull. Oh yeah… Windows don’t know who the hell you are anymore. I mean, sure for the system drive it knows you are its benevolent master. But that separate drive. Ooooh, it’s more inpentetrable than Fort Knox.
Well, there are a thousand different vague answers ranging from so called MS Support and MVP’s to helpful forum users who tells you to install Norton to see if you have a virus, so you at same time can get a thousand new toolbars in IE installed.
There’s _one_ solution that’s worked. Only one. And it’s the command line. Because no OS creator in their right minds would make a command line that cannot rectify the errors all shitty 3rd party applications or window managers can make. Behold, the command:
icacls [The folder you want to get back control over] /reset /t /q
That’s it. Everything you need on one line. Don’t thank me, thank Reddit.