Taking 'ownership' questions.

[tkmops]

I've been told by my Trend Micro Antivirus tech to 'take ownership' of my 'C' drive, but it's been over a week, and I can't get a response to my question.

When I right click my 'C' drive, go to 'properties', then 'security', then 'Advanced', then 'owner', then 'Edit', there's two options in the 'Change owner to' box..

Tod(Tod-PC\Tod) and  Administrators(Tod-PC\Administrators).

What is the difference between
between these two?

I normally sign on with my standard user account 'Tod'(not an administrator account).

Which account should I click in the 'Change owner to' box?

Thanks!

[BC_Programmer]

Administrators is a Group/Role. Tod-PC is a user account (which is almost certainly an administrator account as well).  IF you want to take ownership you should assign it to your account (Tod).

At any rate I question their advice. I don't see any reason to take ownership of the C: drive. What is currently marked as the owner?

[tkmops]

The current owner is 'TrustedInstaller'.

[BC_Programmer]

That is what it should be set to; It is set to that on all my Windows PCs and they are all functioning normally. I'm not sure what the Trend Micro tech's might have been trying to accomplish, but I imagine they wanted you to set ownership to the Tod-PC account.

[tkmops]

Thanks everyone for responding...yikes! looks like I won't be taking ownership of my 'C' drive...sounds very dangerous.

The Trend tech wanted me to take ownership because, about a month ago the Trend scans would 'hang', and just 'freeze'. I let it run for hours, and even overnight, it was still frozen.

The Trend tech and I went back and forth for a month, either on the phone, or via email, trying various things to resolve this. About a week ago, he wanted me to run CHKDSK C:/f/r.

I did that via CMD prompt(elevated), and got this msg::Cannot lock current drive. Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N).   
 
Then he wanted me to change permissions to 'Everyone' Full control for  CREATOR OWNER, SYSTEM, Administrators(Tod-PC\Administrators), Users(Tod-PC\Users), and TrustedInstaller.

The only group that has full control is 'SYSTEM'(there is no Creator Owner, or TrustedInstaller). When I first checked this(last week),  when I clicked the 'Edit' button, and the 'Permissions for Local Disk (C:)' box came up, the 'Add' button was greyed out, and all the boxes in the 'Permissions for Authenticated Users' were un-clickable. But, trying it today, the 'Add' button is hi-lighted. Should I click the 'Full control' boxes for the Authenticated Users,
Administrators(Tod-PC\Administrators), and Users(Tod-PC\Users) groups?  Should I add an 'Everyone', and/or a 'Creator Owner' group and give them full control?

Whew, all so confusing!

Thanks!
 

[Geek-9pm]

When there is some doubt, I do not tell anybody to run
CHKDSK C: /F
.. until other options have been tried. One can run the CHKDSK  with no options and get a report without  any changes made to the partition.
So that makes me think the guy on the phone has not received training.
Or else the people at TredMicro are very careless.

[tkmops]

Thanks for the quick response. I ran chkdsk c:, it came back with '
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.'

Quick DOS question(it's been a loooooooong time since I played with DOS...late '80's/early '90's)...when I bring up the elevated cmd prompt the path defaults to C:\Windows\system32>. Does it matter if I run chkdsk from there or 'C' root?. I navigated back to C:\ and ran chkdsk from there, and go the same 'no problems' msg.

[Geek-9pm]

You don't have a problem with the filesystem.
The problem is that something else. You should not have to take 'ownership' of the C: is that is where the system resides.
Do you have a dual-boot system? I don't think so. The ownership issue can happen when you boot another OS form another partition. If the other OS is on drive D:, you can not make changes to drive C:. That makes sense.
If you a a use with administrative level, you should not have to take ownership of the partition whee he OS resides.
Did you try to boot in safe mode?

[BC_Programmer]

I don't have any confidence that this tech knows at all what they are doing,  because the owner or file permissions for the drive had nothing to do with the message from chkdsk. Perhaps they misunderstood the error message.

The hanging could be due to a hard drive problem nonetheless. It would be necessary to run a surface scan to do that, which I would recommend myself. Just make sure you have a lot of free time as it can take several hours. Overnight might be one way of doing it.

You can run  the surface scan via chkdsk with chkdsk /r. Say yes to both questions which will run it during the next boot, then reboot. It will run the chkdsk which should take several hours.

[tkmops]

I just got a response from the Trend tech, he says to:'Please change the ownership for your drives to Administrators(Tod-PC\Administrators). After changing the ownership,please do the CHKDSK [Drive Letter]: /f /r and afterwards a scan on your drives.'

From what I've read in the prior posts, changing ownership is not a good idea, neither is doing CHKDSK [Drive Letter]: /f /r.

Thoughts, anyone?

Thanks!

[patio]

CHKDSK [Drive Letter]: /f /r.

  is totally redundant.../r assumes /f

The /r switch is all you should ever use with chkdsk...

You sure your talkin to TrendMicro ? ?
Link or contact info ? ?

[tkmops]

I called their phone number as listed in their 'help' link within the Trend program, and have been emailing back and forth with the tech I talked to. You think that the emailer is a scammer?

[BC_Programmer]

You think that the emailer is a scammer?

Scammers would typically be trying to trick you into giviing them money in some way- by say getting remote access to your PC and then claiming you have a lot of viruses.

Seems more like an inexperienced tech to me, or somebody following a script without any real understanding.

[Geek-9pm]

Here is another thing he can to try.   
Boot into safe mode.
Sign in as the Administrator.
He should now have ownership.
Create a new user with administrator privilege.
Log into the new user and check.
Does that help?
Maybe the normal user got corrupted.
Or t may be his normal user got demoted somehow.
Perhaps some kind of malware. (A number of malware things go undetected.)

[tkmops]

Thanks for all the responses...I just did chkdsk both ways...right click the drive, properties, tools, check now(both boxes unchecked), and via DOS elevated, and they came back with 'no problems'. I don't think that the tech is a scammer, as he hasn't asked for $$$, or tried to get me to go a website. It's just possible he's inexperienced, or not trained properly. I will try the 'safe mode' thing after I try a few other things. Will post back later with an update.