Tuesday, December 3, 2019

windows - Deleting/Saving/Transferring files to and from C:/ always asks for Admin rights


To my understanding, I have admin rights set into my account. So when I move/copy/delete files to and from I am always getting a dialog asking for permission. There are no other user of this computer besides me.


How can I stop Windows 10 from telling me I need rights when I have set my account to administrator? I cannot do anything productive on my PC because it always annoys me with this security popups that warrants my attention.


This is costing me productivity.


Any thoughts on this?


EDIT



  1. I've set UAC to never notify


  2. I have software SDK's including the IDEs I use at work on C:\ which
    reside on an SSD. Imagine the horror of it asking permission on C:\
    again and again and again. I cannot even download source code
    without it ever asking permission.



Answer



Short Answer: Grant Yourself NTFS Permissions to the Destination Folder


If you don't want to disable UAC (and face the consequences), you can easily dispense of the annoying Are you sure? prompts by granting yourself Full Control of the folder structure to which you are copying the files. It's a bad idea to do this to the root of your C: volume, so it would be prudent to create a folder in C: to which you have Full Control and then create all of your needed subfolders in there.




Long Answer: File Operations Trigger UAC Because (wait for it...) You're Not an Administrator!


OK...you are an admin...kinda. Read on to find out what this means.


You're getting prompted by UAC for file operations because your user account does not have at least NTFS write permissions to the destination folder. You're probably thinking, "But I'm an Administrator! I have permissions to everything!" If it was 2001 when Windows XP was released you'd be exactly correct. But starting with Vista and the advent of User Account Control (UAC), even members of the local Administrators group aren't treated like admins until after clicking 'Yes' at a UAC elevation prompt.


When an Administrative user (specifically, a member of the local machine's Administrators group) logs on a modern version of Windows, the OS creates two logon tokens (versions prior to Vista only generated one). One of the tokens keeps the administrative rights while the other is stripped of them--effectively demoting it to an unprivileged account. It is this latter token that you think of as your logon session because this is the token first presented for various operations as you go about your business in Windows.


With this information in mind, specifically that your non-privileged logon token is presented first, consider what happens when you access a folder. If you have rights to the folder (i.e. your Windows account name is listed in the ACL as granting permission to the folder), your unprivileged account has access, and there's no UAC prompt.


However, if your user isn't listed in the ACL, but the Administrators group is granted access and you're a member of the Administrators group, then Windows displays the UAC prompt. If you answer 'Yes' to the prompt, Windows retries the file operation using your 2nd logon token with Administrative privileges at which point you gain access.


Bottom line: If you want to avoid UAC prompts for file operations, simply ensure your permissions to the destination folder are granted either directly to your user account, or to a group of which you're a member other than the local machine's Administrators group.




Just to keep things interesting, the rules are different when you logon with the built-in Administrator account. Read more about that in my answer here.


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