Persisting NTFS permissions on an external drive

[Shimmy613]

I've set the permissions on my internal hard drive so my kids can't mess anything up. I tried doing the same thing on an external USB hard drive, but it seems like my addition of their user accounts to the Security tab of that drive was lost somehow: I don't see their account names anymore - not denied, and not at all.

Is there a way to reliably persist permissions even if the drive gets unplugged from the PC?

Thanks,
Shimmy

 

[Shimmy613]

On second thought, this "forgetting" of permissions may have happened when I uninstalled this external drive - I think it was via Windows' native Device Manager. I had to do this because the PC stopped recognizing the drive altogether.

So is losing permissions a concern if the drive is merely unplugged - or only if it's uninstalled? (I'm trying to understand if I need to be concerned or not...)

Thanks again!
Shimmy

 

[linney]

Most external flash drives are formatted as FAT32 which does not support Security Access Permissions. If your External drive was formatted as NTFS it should hold those Security settings, but if you removed some of the other security settings, such as for System, or even the Everyone group (read only), then the System might have trouble reading the drive to ascertain the access permissions. Setting the Deny permission for a particular username might be the way to go but it would only hold for that user on that one machine, because the SID's would be different on another machine.

Use the Vista instructions in this to reset to default the security settings if you want or need to.

How do I restore security settings to the default settings?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313222/#appliesto

 

[Shimmy613]

Linney, thanks for your reply. Firstly, it is an external hard drive, not a flashdrive. Also, I'm not concerned about them plugging it into another PC - just the one it's always attached to. I just want to persist denying write permissions to their accounts to keep our videos safe.

So, in short: un- and re-plugging it shouldn't make it "forget" permissions settings, but uninstalling it would???

Thanks,
Shimmy