Entire drive now read-only?! Help!

[MxGaza33]

Hi! Just joined the forum although have been a fan of linus tech tips along with his other channels for some time.

 

I've came across a strange issue after upgrading to Windows 8.1 recently. I'm running an SSD boot drive with a 2TB drive for storage, when upgrading to windows 8.1 I left the storage drive untouched and just reformatted the SSD and installed 8.1. No problems there.

 

Now a few weeks down the line for some unknown reason Windows has decided to make every single file and folder on the storage drive read-only, and despite my best efforts I can't get them back to normal. When I untick the read-only option and apply it, it just goes right back to read-only?! I've checked the permissions are set to "Full Control", tried changing the owner of the drive to my account, removing the account from permissions and re-adding it, created a local admin account rather than the microsoft account I usually log in with but nothing has worked.

 

Another thing is that when using my download manager (IDM) it has started asking me for administration permission to save to the storage drive every time I download a file which it didn't do before. Compressed files won't extract either, I have to copy it to my boot drive to extract them!

 

It's driving me crazy and I'm out of ideas, can anyone help?

[Mujteba]

Take ownership of the entire drive

Open an elevated command prompt (run as admin) 
Firstly use the command:
takeown /f "[put the drive letter here eg. E:\]" /r /d y

 

Then use:

icacls "your storage drive letter[eg. E:\]" /grant "Your Username":(f) /t /q

 

Hope this helps

 

EDIT: Made a small mistake above which is now fixed (wrote icalcs instead of icacls)

[MxGaza33]

 Thanks for the reply, followed your instructions and unticked the read-only box but still it sets itself back! *sigh*

[Mujteba]

 Thanks for the reply, followed your instructions and unticked the read-only box but still it sets itself back! *sigh*

Then go to cmd again (elevated)

Enter the command:

Diskpart

 

Now enter:

List volume

From here find which drive is the storage one

 

Then:

Select volume X (whichever number it was that was listed)

 

Finally: 

Attributes disk clear readonly

 

Should say cleared successfully and now reset the pc you're done

[MxGaza33]

Done, now we're faced with "Diskpart failed to clear disk attributes."

 

I'm wondering what could have caused this, possibly fault with the actual drive itself?

[Mujteba]

Did you run the cmd as admin?

[MxGaza33]

Yep and followed the steps exactly as above. It seems even new files created on the drive are created as read-only, everything I want to edit needs to be moved to the boot drive. Argh!

[MxGaza33]

Found a solution, I had to set the owner of the drive to users (Gaza-PC\Users in my case) and add my account to the permissions list even though administrators and users were already on the list. Any other owner did not work, only "Users".

 

Strangely the read-only box on all folders is still ticked but this just seems to be the way 8.1 is, as I can edit files as normal now. My Surface Pro with 8.1 on it also shows all folders as read-only. So it seems Microsoft have just made a right mess of the permissions on 8.1 as it makes no sense and seems to do what it feels like, but at least for now it's back to normal!