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Corrupt Security Desciptors - Fixable?

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by spbrown 1 view

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A client with a Gateway laptop running XP Pro said he lost everything, all his documents and all his work in his My Documents folder. I was sceptical but he was correct, what was there no longer is. Checking the properties of the My Documents foldershows it to be 348MB. Looking inside the folder and adding all files and folders together (yes, show hidden files & folders is turned on) shows less than 2MB of content. Running Norton Disk Doctor shows corrupt security descriptors. It can't fix it and chkdsk doesn't either. Samnatec's web site suggests either formatting the drive or using a 3rd party scanner.

Does anyone know of a product that can repair security descriptors or the file system? The drive is NTFS.

Thank you.

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by hrhold1

Have you tried the registry editor to view the security settings that are assigned to a registry entry. Will your RepairDisk reinstate the original configuration to fix the problem?
If you have used Linux/Unix you could try the following:http://www.iain.cx/articles/acls/

Windows 2000/NT/XP supports access control lists controlling file permissions (as indeed do many flavours of Unix, either out of the box or with kernel patches). The problem on Windows 2000 is a little different:

Obtainthe directory's security descriptor.

Extract the discretionary access control list from the security descriptor

Create a new ACL which mirrors the DACL obtained above

Either add an access control entry to explicitly revoke write access to Everyone or modify any existing ACEs pertaining to Everyone so that write access is not granted

Apply the new ACL to a new security descriptor

Replace the directory's security descriptor

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