Often you need to access different areas of the operating system which has restricted access. If you want to access some of the restricted areas, you need to make different registry customizations and then you will be able to get unrestricted access to different areas in Windows 10. Whenever Windows 10 gives you access denied alter and requires administrator authentication then you need to view the folder ownership first. It is very easy to get unrestricted access to different files and folders all you need to follow a few simple steps.
Viewing the Folder Ownership
A small and free tool known as PSTools makes it very easy to view the ownership of the file as well as provides support for different other operations.
Download the PSTools from Microsoft and Extract the zip file you get, copy the folder location where the extracted data is present and copy it to Desktop.
Run the Command Prompt with administrator privileges, use cd command to move to the folder location where the tool is present.
Open the folder location and run the command:
psexec -i -s cmd.exe
A new on-screen alert will open and accept the PSTools EULA. Accept it and a new command line interface will open.
Now close the Command Prompt you previously opened with administrator privileges. This new command line will reveal the folder ownership.
Run the given command in the new command prompt to reveal the folder ownership.
icacls "folder_path"
Example:
icacls C:\Windows\System32
It will return the folder owner i.e. TrustedInstaller is the owner of System32. Now all the System32 folders and files can be accessed by the administrator. All the subfolders inherit the same properties as the parent folder.
To be more precise, you can run the same icacls command to include the folder path that you want to access.
icacls C:\Windows\System32\DriverState
These permissions are very hard to understand and a non-technical user might not understand them. So you may use Microsoft help document that explains different terms that the icacls command returns.
When working as an administrator, you can change the ownership of a folder from Windows 10 GUI as well as different third-party applications. You need to be very much careful while making any changes to folder permissions, it may sometimes break down the system or decreases the security level of the operating system.
You may also like to know HOW TO OPEN FILES AND FOLDERS IN COMMAND PROMPT