How to take Ownership (Full Control) of Files or Folders in Windows

Taking ownership or permissions for a file or folder is necessary when it comes to changing the system files. Most of the time it is the themes, skins, other customization or just patching a host file. Even if you are an administrator, you won’t have permissions to edit or even rename the system files. In this article, we’ll show you how to take the ownership of these files or folders, in case you want to modify or replace them.

Take Ownership of a file or folder automatically:

This is a very simple method to take ownership of a file or folder. Just download this file to your computer, extract it and merge the Add Take Ownership Option.reg file in your registry by double clicking it. Click Yes, when asked for permission. As soon as you’re done with this, you’ll see an option added to the right-click context menu. Right Click on a file and folder and from there you can take the ownership of it.

Manual way to take the ownership of a file or folder:

If you are getting problems with the automatic way, follow these instructions to get this ownership and full permissions to files or folders manually.

Keep in mind the following method works for almost every version of Windows. Administrator accounts in Windows 8 already have full permissions to the files.

• Go to the folder which contains the file or folder on which you want to take ownership. In this case it was C:\Windows\System32 , Right-click on the file and select Properties.
• In the Properties dialog, go to Security tab, select your username from the given list. Notice that you don’t have Full Control of this file.

• Click on “Advanced” button and go to “Owner” tab. You’ll see that the owner would be set to “TrustedInstaller“.

• Click on “Edit” button, select your username given in “Change owner to” section and click on “Apply” button. It’ll ask for confirmation, click on OK button.

• Exit from both Ownership dialog boxes and come to the first Properties window again. Now select your username again and click on “Edit” button.

• Select your username and click on “Allow” checkbox given for “Full control” option. Click on “Apply” button and then OK. It’ll ask for confirmation, click on Yes button.

• Now you’ll have full permission on the file or folder.

That’s it, now you can modify, replace or delete a system file without a problem, just make sure to take a backup of that file before modifying it.