"My Music" "My Pictures" "My Video" access denied

Lenovo T500 - Vista Home Basic, factory installed.

I cannot open any of the preinstalled "My [whatever]" files in my Documents folder. The icons look like shortcuts (And are sort of grayed out compared to other folders I create.) The detail list shows these as folders and permissions on the folders are all enabled for my user name.

When I try to open any of them I get " [file path] is not accessible Access is denied." Wait - "My Music" says "You don't currently have permission to access this folder."

Any new folders I create are fully accessible.

Perhaps related, I see desktop.ini files appearing in several directories. I would tell you how many there are, but at the moment I cannot see how to search for files by name. that seems to be gone from the context menu.

This behavior is like that out of the box.

My inclination is to delete and recreate these directories but I'm reluctant to do so without understanding the problem in the first place.

Any idea why I cannot access these? I'm a Vista noob and not even an XP expert since I mostly use Linux.

thanks,
hank

 

desktop.ini ?? I suspect a USB virus has infected your system , try running a virus scan

or just right click the properties and under security tab > ownership > take ownership of the folder

 

check and make sure your loged in as administrator.

 

'desktop.ini' is nothing to worry about. As I type this search has found hundreds of them on my two drives. It tells Windows explorer how to display a particular directory.

 

The file desktop.ini is, by itself, not an issue - .Windows uses that file to customize the view of the folder containing the file, as described in more detail in this MSDN article.

On the other hand, it is possible that the desktop.ini file for each of your "special" folders has been corrupted, or infected, so you might open each one up in notepad and see if it matches what Microsoft describes in the above-linked MSDN article.

Beyond that, have you done anything related to file permissions lately? It sounds like what's happened is that those files have either become associated with another username (i.e., not yours) or for some other reason your username access permissions have been changed so that you're no longer permitted to access the files.

That all could be the work of some bit of malware, so doing a thorough A/V scan is certainly the order of the day for you.

 

I'll do the scan the next time I run Vista. Hard to imagine that it has been compromised after only a few hours of operation. I've only had it a bit more than 24 hours at this point and the only USB stick I've had on it has mostly been used on Linux hosts.

I already have ownership of those files with all rights. That's what makes this so puzzling. However... I see links for "Music", "Videos" and Pictures in the upper part of the browser. I can click those and see what is most likely those folder contents. Does Vista require that I access those folders as places rather than directly as file folders?

I found the "find" function. It's been moved from the file menu to a place on the browser itself. And it turns out that I don't have that many desktop.ini files after all. The contents of the one on my desktop are:

Code:

[.ShellClassInfo]
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-21769
IconResource=%SystemRoot%\system32\imageres.dll,-183
[LocalizedFileNames]
[email protected],-21770

Makes no sense to me...

thanks,
hank

 

The desktop.ini that you quoted is innocuous; those settings basically tell explorer where to go looking in the registry for the settings that pertain to the folder in which that particular desktop.ini is stored.

On the main topic, not being able to access your various folders, it sounds as if things have been a mite SNAFU'd by .Lenovo, because from what you describe it sounds more like what you have is a _Vista installation that was upgraded ontop of an XP installation and not a fresh _Vista installation.

Microsoft has a KB article that relates to being unable to access your "My Documents", "My <etc>" folders after an upgrade from XP to _Vista - KB930128 - in which it describes the "My <whatever>" objects that appear in _Vista after the upgrade as junction points whose sole function is to point to the location where the files that used to be in the "My <whatever>" folders are now stored - customarily, that would be "%systemdrive%\Users\user_name\<whatever>" such as "%systemdrive%\Users\user_name\Documents" for the old XP "My Documents" folder.

Read through that KB article and see if anything described in there is of any help.

 

They are not real, not shortcuts, they are " Junction Points". Ignore them.

 

Yes, Thanks Shyster and JohnDoe. It does seem that they are Junction Points (which sound a lot like symlinks.) As near as I can tell, there are not actually directories so I don't think this is the result of an XP -> Vista upgrade. Nor can I create similarly named directories. That operation silently fails and the directory name just reverts to what it was.

Also from the descriptions, it seems that the browser should switch to the substitute directories when I click on it but doesn't. However, now that I know I'm not supposed to use those, I'll just go to the place where Microsoft wants me to store these files. (sheesh - who is serving who?)

thanks,
hank

 

You can create them via the mklink command

 

Junction points in WinOS are, basically, symlinks, although I think in MS-ese they are also called hard links. Just to make the language even more abstruse, I believe that junction points and hard links are both variants of the underlying "reparsing point" object (if I recall something I read about them in the context of MS Powershell).

I'm not really sure why you have junction points given that you have an ostensibly factory pre-installed copy of _Vista - the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that the image Lenovo duped in order to do mass imaging for preinstallation purposes happened to be an upgrade installation - I know, I know, it doesn't make any sense, but that's about all I can speculate on at this point.

 

I had the same problem
What I did was go to DOCUMENTS
then left click and drag MY VIDEOS down to the start button but don't click
the start menu should pop up
drag my videos up under the Internet Explorer button on the left
then exit out of everything
and you should have access to MY VIDEOS