Access denied, but I'm the Administrator!
Recently my HTPC, Windows Media Center (WMC) running under Windows 7, started to exhibit an odd issue. One
or two of the recordings couldn’t be deleted from within WMC. So I tried falling back to closing down WMC and
deleting the files from the Recorded TV directory, only to receive an “Access Denied” error message. Ok, let’s
run a shell (cmd) as the administrator user change to the Recorded TV directory and use del
to delete the files.
Still I got the “Access Denied” error message.
Looking at the files properties showed even more odd results, they weren’t owned by anyone. When I tried to change the owner to the administrator account I go the same error message. This was the point that I decided to fall back to basics, if the file system is behaving oddly then check the disk, so I ran
chkdsk c: /R
It replied that it couldn’t check it now but would I like to check it on the next restart, which of course I said yes to and then immediately restarted the machine. 20 minutes later, after a full disk check, windows reappeared and I could delete the files. My current assumption is that windows had lost some of the ntfs details for the files and that the chkdsk reset them.