As a service to mere mortals here's how to "undo" the woes of access control lists (permissions) in Windows 8. Microsoft has fiddled with them and some techniques that apparently worked in Win7 don't work in Win8.
All of this assumes you are logged in as a user with administrative rights. I have no idea about other kinds of users.
First you need to open a command prompt as an administrator. Navigate to the folder you want to "recover" and in Explorer's File menu choose "Open command prompt" and then "Open command prompt as administrator". The command prompt will appear and be in the target folder you want to recover.
First type this command; it recursively makes you the owner of every file.
This will respond by showing every file that you've taken ownership of. Please note the part of the message: "now owned by user". Take a note of that user ID, as you'll need it for the next step.
Having become the owner of all these files, you can't do anything with them until you give yourself permission:
Code:
icacls . /grant:r USERNAME:(CI)(OI)F /t /c
Congratulations, you now have your files.
This saved me from having to manually set permissions on roughly 22,000 files. Things like icacls /reset failed hard.
If an expert feels like refining these instructions then please do. That second line is perhaps over-zealous, but it got me my files back. I've wasted about 5 hours on this nonsense and I'm not amused.
