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I have an external drive on which I downloaded files from a OneDrive for Business account that was on an old PC going to be decomissioned and to which I don't have access anymore (neither the pc, nor the OneDrive account).

When I try to access any file on the drive I get an error message saying that I don't have reading rights to access the file.

If I go on right-click > Properties > Security I see a message saying "you must have read Read permission to view the properties of this object".

However it's enough to copy the files on my new PC to obtain the required rights and open the files.

However, I have 900GB of files over thousands of individual files and copying each of them one-by-one on my new machine (which has 300GB of free space) is going to take a very long time.

Is there a way to change the reading rights of all these files in bulk without copying them on the new system and back?

Luca
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    Look up icacls, if the files are not protected by any form of encryption, this tool should allow you to rewrite all permissions and special attributes of a file. – CraftyB Oct 10 '22 at 19:19
  • @CraftyB Thank you. I solved it doing in an Administrator prompt `takeown /F D:\ /R` followed by `icacls D:\ /grant Everyone:(OI)(CI)F /T` where `D:\ ` was clearly the external drive I wanted to take ownership of . If you can put your answer and these commands in an Answer i will accept it – Luca Oct 10 '22 at 20:56

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