I recently upgraded by Dell XPS desktop computer from Win 7 to Win 10, and installed Reflect v6.1.1225 after that.  I had been using a 2 TB Western Digital external drive for backups for about three years now.  Everything has worked fine until Windows 10 came along.  After creating a new Rescue CD this morning, I tested to see if it could read backup image files on the external drive.  It could not.  Whenever I selected either an image or a file backup to open, I got the message:

"You don't have permission to open this file.  Contact the file owner of the administrator to obtain permission."

I would think that the Win 10 rescue CD would allow full control access to all volumes on the system, since there is no login procedure to go through.  But apparently it doesn't.  So I went back and, as the computer administrator, made sure that "Everyone" had at least "Read" and "List folder contents" access to the external drive.  After rebooting with the rescue CD, it came up with the same error message as above.

I don't know how the rescue CD will do any good if it can't access any of the backup files.

Wow, that indeed seemed to have solved the problem!  The only object that had ANY permissions to the "Reflect" folder on the external drive was myself.  "Everyone" was not mentioned, nor was "System".  I then added "System" and gave it "Full Control" privileges.  Then the rescue CD could open the files.  I didn't try a full restore, but did manage to mount a backup image made last night and copy a 4 GB Outlook data file from it to its original location.  So everything seems to be in order now.

I should mention that a previous rescue CD created three weeks ago under Win 7 did NOT work either, even though it did when I first created it.  So the problem was with Win 10.

It occurred to me that probably the reason why Win 10 didn't give anyone permission to the external drive was due to it being installed at the local computer store, without the external drive being attached to the computer.  It's probably best when installing a new OS to have any backup drives attached while this is going on.  This can save some aggravation later when it comes to assigning the proper privileges to such drives.

Anyway, I appreciate your help with this!

Good.  Glad you got it working okay.  Win10 does some strange things during its install/upgrade process, but I haven't heard of it changing permissions on an external drive before.  Just a guess, but I think I'd suspect some inadvertent mistake in folder creation and permission assignments.  Either that or your local computer store gang.  They're not all as well trained and experienced as one might hope and, like any of us, certainly not immune to occasional dumb moves.


Regards, Richard V. ("Arvy")