My Documents folder has suddenly declared itself Read-Only (I did nothing to change permissions) and I cannot change it. I have tried the File Explorer/Documents/Properties/Security/Advanced/Change Permissions and Change Owner. Panel does nothing but re-display with change options grayed out. I have tried command prompt. All to no avail. All above was with Run as Administrator.
Frustrating, Any suggestions?
Do you mean the Documents folder? (ie) C:\Isers\UserName\Documents?
There is a My Documents folder which is a place holder left over from previous Windows versions in a separate that you do not have access to. .
Add Take Ownership to the Right Click Context menu, and Take Ownership of the Documents folder
Hopefully the Take-Ownership step will fix the problem.
My 'Documents' folder has always been 'Read-only' but I have never had any trouble editing files and saving the changes so I think it may be a Windows 10 glitch where it is mis-reporting the status. I think Windows 10 mis-reporting has been mentioned regarding other issues as well.
Is it affecting your ability to edit and save changes? If not then at least you are not seriously affected.
Mine but as noted the Read-only applies to files, haven't had any issues on my computers and saving to that folder.
This (IMHO) is Microsofts greatest sin in UI design. Two checkboxs, right next to each other. One is both Status Indicator & Switch (Hidden), the other iS NOT A STATUS INDICATOR, it's a tri-state switch! The gray square is always the default when the Properties dialog is first displayed, as it means "Leave the Read-only attribute on files in this folder unchanged." It does not mean "Some files are, some files aren't" as so many assert --- if it did, a completely empty folder would display a cleared checkbox & not a square.
It may have been marked RO before though I never noticed because I have never had problems saving to it before, and I save to it almost every day. All of sudden it just started refusing to save saying I didn't have permission and giving me "Access Denied" even as administrator.
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Thanks but it did not solve the problem.
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One odd thing I just noticed, and I don't know if it is relevant or not, is that I have two C:\Users folders. The subfolders are the same but the contents of each subfolder are different. However neither of the folders like Documents, Pictures, Downloads match what is contained in the ThisPC\Documents, Pictures,Downloads,etc folders. The This PC versions are "correct" in that they have all the files I expect and have been working with. Just as a data reference I put the PC together (about a year and a half ago) and made pointers from the C: drive for several of these folders to reduce the load off my SSD C: drive. I had no problems with that and again I don't know if it is relevant to this permissions problem.
You have two C:\Users folders? Maybe one of them has been mounted? Have you tried to see if you can unmount the 'wrong' 'C:\Users' folder?
If you have more then one User Profile name,(ie) C:\Users\Joe, and C:\Users\John for example you would have separate User files for each User login. Is this what you mean? Or do you have two of each user file (ie) Documents, Pictures etc under your User Name?
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