Anilrgowda

Question: Hi

Please I need urgent help right now. I have system running windows xp home edition, my two SATA harddrives with 250 GB each are formatted into 5 partitions:
C,D,F are on the first hard drive
E, G are on the second hard drives

They all are NTFS formatted. Ok now here's the stupid thing I did:

I installed my windows xp on partition C, and installed all my programs on partition E, I mean the usual installation, and everything went fine, then decided to see what the security tabs, which is not visible by default on windows xp, home edition, maybe to stop nosy people like me from fooling around. I used a hack posted on Kellys XP Korner to get the security tab or console to show up in my windows xp home edition tabs, you know when you right click and see all of those "Tools", "Hardware" ...etc tabs show up.

So, it came visible infront of me all the accounts or security groups that have priviliges to access my system. So, I decided, out of sheer stupidity to do the following:
1. I right clicked each partition, and then brought up the security tab, and then deleted all of those "annoying" accounts, such as users, creator owner, everyone, help, ..etc accounts, except the administrator, and the administrators group, and then I started adding back the users and my defaul user account ..and of course I changed the ownership, from my account, which holds the name "Ashraf Kadry" to the "administrators" group. and of course, because I'm a very apt pupil of the retarded movement, I to choose the "apply changed to containers and subscontainers" group..

this resulted in the following:

all of my programs starting from office xp applications down to all other my programs are not accessible anymore.

and I cannot even backup important files, which I keep on partition C, you know the documents and settings part, to do a fresh installation. Therefore, I decided to stop using any application at all, so I won't affect them or force any permissions on them. all, I can do now is use my IE explorer, and Outlook express to receive mail, since I can't use any other programs.

please please, can somone help me.?

Anilrgowda

Again, the cacls command should do this...
you might try it with a /c
cacls e:\ /t /c /g Everyone:F

Barring that working - right-click E (from my computer) - choose sharing and security - from the security tab, click Advanced.
Now go to the Owner tab and choose your name to take ownership, making sure to check the box about applying on all subfolders.

Once that completes - if successful, you should be able to repeat the process, but this time entering your username in there and again pushing permissions down to all sublevels.

In the end you should have your account, Administrators, creator owner and system to effectively limit access (you can remove Administrators, but that's your call).