"Owner" : Question rephrased: Help

[George]

In my earlier messages, I wrote about reassigning
ownership to different profiles. To the two individuals
who replied, thank you very much for the information,
both of your entries taught me.

However, my question was not properly phrased, and
perhaps someone will have an answer if I can get my
question right - this is my challenge.

Here is my question rephrased:

When you set up XP Home or Pro, the first profile you
name (no matter what you name it while running the OS
setup) will be designated "Owner" when viewed under
Documents and Settings. If you log in as any other
profile than the one first established, you will still
see there is a "Owner" directory in the Documents and
Settings folder.

As it turns out, if this PC ever crashes, the contents in
the "Owner" folder/directory becomes unavailable if you
set up the drive as a slave to a different drive for
recovery purposes, while content in all of the other
profiles is more easily accessible. I have suffered
through this with several XP Home/Pro installations.

My question is whether the "Owner" profile may be
reassigned to a profile created after the first profile
is established. Otherwise, I will move all the data
content initially established through the Owner profile
to a later established profile.

A follow on question is to learn more about the nature of
the "Owner" profile: is it not the default Administrator
profile you would see from setting up an NT workstation?
That there must be an owner to a PC with certain rights
and privileges? Or something like that?

Thank you again for all help and clarification.

-George

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

The "Owner" user account and accompanying profile is only created
by OEM PC suppliers, because they have no way of knowing the name of
the PC's eventual purchaser, and to give the new PC owner a profile to
use immediately. With a retail version of the OS, whenever WinXP is
installed on a computer, only two user accounts are automatically
created: Administrator and Guest. During the installation, WinXP Pro
will ask the installer to designate the Administrator's password, but
WinXP Home will not do so, leaving the password blank by default. Any
other user account created during installation will be created with
whatever privileges (administrator or limited user) assigned by the
person performing the installation. If the defaults are accepted,
this first account, iirc, is granted administrative privileges.

Once the computer's new owner creates their own user accounts, new
user profiles are created as well. Some settings and files may be
copied from one user profile to another, but these profiles are
semi-protected files that cannot even be renamed. (Profiles can,
however, be deleted if the attached user account is deleted.) Under
normal circumstances, the files in the private folders of each user
profile are not accessible to other users. This is a privacy and
security feature of the operating system. A user with administrative
privileges can access everything, but not without leaving a "trail" as
a sort of check and balance. Hence the need to take ownership, which
will deny access to the original file owner, leaving clear evidence
that the files have been accessed by someone else, a person with
administrative privileges.

In the "crash" case you're asking about, anyone with
administrative privileges would be able to take ownership of the files
in the Owner profile and hence recover them. As a proactive step,
it's wise to use individualized user accounts and profiles from the
beginning, rather than ever allowing the pre-created user accounts to
be used for daily computing.

Bruce Chambers

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"George" > wrote in message
...
> In my earlier messages, I wrote about reassigning
> ownership to different profiles. To the two individuals
> who replied, thank you very much for the information,
> both of your entries taught me.
>
> However, my question was not properly phrased, and
> perhaps someone will have an answer if I can get my
> question right - this is my challenge.
>
> Here is my question rephrased:
>
> When you set up XP Home or Pro, the first profile you
> name (no matter what you name it while running the OS
> setup) will be designated "Owner" when viewed under
> Documents and Settings. If you log in as any other
> profile than the one first established, you will still
> see there is a "Owner" directory in the Documents and
> Settings folder.
>
> As it turns out, if this PC ever crashes, the contents in
> the "Owner" folder/directory becomes unavailable if you
> set up the drive as a slave to a different drive for
> recovery purposes, while content in all of the other
> profiles is more easily accessible. I have suffered
> through this with several XP Home/Pro installations.
>
> My question is whether the "Owner" profile may be
> reassigned to a profile created after the first profile
> is established. Otherwise, I will move all the data
> content initially established through the Owner profile
> to a later established profile.
>
> A follow on question is to learn more about the nature of
> the "Owner" profile: is it not the default Administrator
> profile you would see from setting up an NT workstation?
> That there must be an owner to a PC with certain rights
> and privileges? Or something like that?
>
> Thank you again for all help and clarification.
>
> -George

[Roger Abell [MVP]]

Hey George,

I believe Ron has explained the OEM defined Owner account.
You may also be interested in knowing that these profile folders
in Documents and Settings are special. For on thing, if you rename
an account then its profile folder will always retain the name it had
when it was first created (when that account was first used to log in).
If you fiddle with it, the OS will likely see it as corrupt and unusable
and create a new one.

If your OEM version placed much special config into the Owner
profile, then it is likely that it will do the same in any new profile
(this is usually done by modifying the Default User profile which
is copied in the process of creating a new user profile).
So, if you define a new admin account and use it, it is very likely
that there is nothing available to the Owner account that is not
also available via the new account's profile.

When you in the past have had difficulty accessing profile areas
when a disk is hung on a different system those areas where you
were denied had likely been "made private". Exerciseing the option
to make a profile private removes grants to the Administrators group
from the NTFS permissions of the profile. So, when hung on a
different system you can go wherever Administrators have a grant
of NTFS permissions, but get denied where they do not.
This is easily fixed by taking ownership of the denied areas, and
when prompted agreeing to let it set adequate permissions.

Take Ownership see Help and Support, or
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308421


"George" > wrote in message
...
> In my earlier messages, I wrote about reassigning
> ownership to different profiles. To the two individuals
> who replied, thank you very much for the information,
> both of your entries taught me.
>
> However, my question was not properly phrased, and
> perhaps someone will have an answer if I can get my
> question right - this is my challenge.
>
> Here is my question rephrased:
>
> When you set up XP Home or Pro, the first profile you
> name (no matter what you name it while running the OS
> setup) will be designated "Owner" when viewed under
> Documents and Settings. If you log in as any other
> profile than the one first established, you will still
> see there is a "Owner" directory in the Documents and
> Settings folder.
>
> As it turns out, if this PC ever crashes, the contents in
> the "Owner" folder/directory becomes unavailable if you
> set up the drive as a slave to a different drive for
> recovery purposes, while content in all of the other
> profiles is more easily accessible. I have suffered
> through this with several XP Home/Pro installations.
>
> My question is whether the "Owner" profile may be
> reassigned to a profile created after the first profile
> is established. Otherwise, I will move all the data
> content initially established through the Owner profile
> to a later established profile.
>
> A follow on question is to learn more about the nature of
> the "Owner" profile: is it not the default Administrator
> profile you would see from setting up an NT workstation?
> That there must be an owner to a PC with certain rights
> and privileges? Or something like that?
>
> Thank you again for all help and clarification.
>
> -George