Changing User Permissions for an Entire Drive

In Windows, every disk drive has an associated security profile which determines who is allowed access to the drive and what kind of access (e.g., read or write) a user is entitled to. If you are an administrator or have Control access to the drive, you can change the drive's permissions, thereby allowing or denying certain types of access.

To see a drive's permissions, click the Start menu button and then Computer. This displays all the drives accessible through your system. Right-click on the drive whose permissions you want to change and choose Properties. In the resulting dialog box make sure the Security tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Permissions associated with drive E:.

This particular screen shot shows that user "Jim Olin" has three permissions for the drive: Read & Execute, List Folder Contents, and Read. To deny that user access, click the Edit button and again select user Jim Olin. Windows presents a dialog box that allows you to specify permissions for the user. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2. Editing permissions of drive E: for user Jim Olin.

Now click the Deny checkboxes that are beside the three checked boxes and OK out of the Properties dialog boxes. Now, when user Jim Olin attempts to access the "E:" drive he gets an error message and is prevented from accessing the drive.