Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?

I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.

This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.

Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.

I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.

The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.

Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.

Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.

Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.

But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.

Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.

My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...

Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?

The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T

I. Hate. Windows. Apps. UGH.

I may never be able to play FS2020 from the Xbox Game Pass again as... Its unable to install, gives a helpful 0x1 error code, and the help page link goes to a 404.

Now, I caused this myself... Partially... Er, no, fully, but I had a good reason!

I wanted to install something larger again and didn't have enough disk space. Fired up WinDirStat and there was a huge, like... 45 GB file in C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Somedir\

Googling around, I found some people saying its a temp file so that Windows Store could reserve enough space for the app instalation... Okay, so... It got stuck, and I had no way to remove it?

Of course I didn't want to remove all apps of the windows market... So, I did something any *sane* person would never do - Took ownership of the whole WindowsApps and gave myself full control. Then I removed the file and... FS2020 never launched again.

I couldn't even uninstall it! It would give me no error either. It just lagged and then did nothing.

I tried resetting all the ACLs, tried giving ownership back to TrustedInstaller, nothing worked. Failed on some of the files, wtf?

Launching the game only ever told me there was an update in progress.

Tried booting a windows iso image and fix the ACLs from there, nope, also failed for the same bunch of files of FS2020. (Permission Denied while on a live image? Wow)

Last resort, I booted up Linux and tried removing the offending folders from there, only to find out that... Huh. The NTFS module labelled the offending folders as... broken links leading to an "unsupported reparse point". But hey, it let me remove it at least.

Since then, it no longer appeared as installed, but... Now, anytime I want to install it, it just throws an error 0x00000001 with no further details.

So yeah, I know I caused this myself, but after fiddling with the permissions and ACLs and NTFS dark magic, I feel justified in saying - Fuck you WindowsApps DRM.