Strip my windows NTFS disk of all ACLs

Posted by Alain Pannetier on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Alain Pannetier
Published on 2011-01-29T08:59:27Z Indexed on 2011/01/29 15:28 UTC
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Filed under:

Windows

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powershell

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acl

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ntfs

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cacls

When you purchase a windows PC nowadays, you don't actually "own" the whole disk...

There are so many ACLs on each folder that there are portions of it you actually can access only through a complex sequence of actions requiring skills well beyond the average PC user. You have to drill down to deeply buried dialog boxes accessible through concealed buttons. You have to understand at which level of the hierarchy you have to take ownership, remove ACLs etc...
Yet when you think of it, that's your PC, that's what the "P" of PC originally stand for...
So I'm toying with the idea of just stripping the disk of all ACLs I just purchased and leave standard file protections do the basic protection work... Just like previous century Windows used to do... (before I chmod -R 777 ;-)

Has anybody done that already and nevertheless survived in reasonably good shape for a reasonable amount of time ?

Any technical advice to do that ? Powershell script ? basic script using iCACLS ?

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