So I have an old hard drive with Windows on it that I threw into my current computer. I want to get the stuff on it but since it's all in the Users folder, the permissions won't let me enter the folders unless I allow it to elevate to give me access by adding the necessary permissions. This wouldn't be so great since there's TONS of files in there as expected and it would have to propagate down, which would take eons since it's a spinning disk.
I then had the grand idea of trying to use admin mode to traverse through the folders since they all have the administrators group permission. Unfortunately that didn't work and it prompts to elevate for permission changes like before.
I did a bit of searching while writing this and the closest thing I found was this old thread that seems to talk about folder traversal as admin to work with their special setup. It was mentioned that it wasn't very simple to do, but has there been any more discussions about implementing this? It would make things much easier for situations similar to mine. The only workaround currently is to elevate the entire process (run as administrator DOpus) which is less than ideal for obvious reasons.
I think we can now read directories via elevation if needed, unless I imagined that.
Either way, repermissioning the whole drive should not take that long, even on a spinning disk with a lot of files. No more than a couple of minutes, I would've thought. That's what I would do if the old permissions don't need to be kept as they were.
When I upgrade equipment, like a lot of people, I put the old hard drive into my computer, copy stuff off that I want to keep, and then format it so I can recycle the hard drive for some other purpose. If that's going to be your route, I recommend adding a "Take Ownership" context menu entry.
There's one discussed here and, if I recall correctly, this is the one I actively use:
Leo's version at the post I specifically linked (it has a short 2-line code section starting with @admin) is the nicer of the two methods as it doesn't require changing the registry.
After you have ownership, no more elevation should be required to access that hard drive.