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General discussion

Why Are Vista Directories Marked Read-Only?

by tonyny77 Aug 6, 2008 2:36AM PDT

Does anyone know why ALL my directories have the Read-Only attribute turned on? No, I didn't check EVERY single directory, but I checked scores of directories including ones I created.

I'm using a Vista Home Premium system. My system seems to work well, but this Read-Only attribute for all my directories arouses my curiosity. This must be by design, but I still wonder what purpose this serves.

Note, also, that I've also experimented with a few directories that I manually created (non-system directories) by trying to remove the Read-Only attribute. I did this by right-clicking on a directory, selecting Properties, clearing the Read-Only check mark, clicked Apply and OK. If there are sub-directories and I select the option to apply the change to all sub-directories, I even get the progress bar indicating my change is being processed. Yet after completing the change and checking again, the Read-Only attribute is still applied.

Any ideas as to why this is? Thanks, all.

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3 Posts
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Isn't that a good thing?
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Aug 6, 2008 7:02AM PDT

Why would an OS not do this? To me this seems very proper and a nice first line of defense.

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Well Then, I Guess I Just Don't Understand ...
by tonyny77 Aug 6, 2008 12:48PM PDT

Bob ... Well, then I guess I need to do some reading about how permissions and access are controlled in Windows. I just presumed that if a directory is Read-Only, no user would be able to write to it ... Somewhat like a UNIX permission mode of "444". Obviously I'm presuming wrong. Time for me to do some studying.

Thanks, Bob.

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If I really want to alter what's inside a protected folder.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Aug 6, 2008 11:20PM PDT

I would boot into another OS that doesn't honor such flags.

There are some questions that should result in asking members to go get a fine book but here I had hope that a simple answer would do.

-> Let's be clear here. Microsoft didn't issue or reveal their Operating System design documents so we can't tell what their intentions or goals are. Anyone that does tell you has to answer from a speculative or subjective view.

Bob

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