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I know this has been asked before because I already tried every answer I could google up. Please read through before marking it as duplicate.

My home machine has two accounts set up:

  • one simple unprivileged user
  • another administrator account with full control over everything

There are times when I would need to perform some action which requires administrator rights, such as deleteing something from C:\ . For the love of all that is holy I cannot convince the windows file explorer that it is running with administrator account with full control over everything. I tried:

  • running as administrator which prompts UAC to ask for username and password at which point I use the admin account
  • shift right click and choose run as different user at which point I receive the same prompt as above
  • running command prompt with the admin account and starting explorer.exe from there
  • checking the Run as administrator option in the advanced properties of the explorer shortcut
  • the suggestions from this superuser answer and failed
  • running various combinations of the runas command through an elevated command prompt

Every single time I want to perform some privileged action on some privileged file I get either the access denied message or another message stating my user is not in the administrators group. Even when I try to take ownership of a folder (from myself, because I am already the owner of it and all its contents) it tells me access denied.

And yes, I do have the rights to do anything and everything because if I use command prompt with the admin account I can rmdir, mkdir, etcdir all day long without any issues. I can even start free commander with admin account and do whatever without any problems. Why is the file explorer so stubborn?

The reason I have set up two accounts is that I like to remote into this machine, using RDP, from work for example. Only the unprivileged account is allowed to RDP into this machine. I cannot and do not want to allow RDP with the administrator account. This is just to explain why I don't log in with the administrator account but this does not affect the issue. Even when I am at home and log in with the admin account I experience the same problem with an elevated file explorer window.

It is not a corrupted window installation, this very same problem occurs on a fresh clean install after the hard drive has been formatted.

user1969903
  • 207

2 Answers2

1

From the article How to Run File Explorer as Administrator in Windows 10:

It is not easy to run File Explorer as Administrator. This ability is locked and can't be enabled easily. Here is how you can enable this feature.

  • Download the free ExecTI, which allows running Programs as TrustedInstaller, and unpack it to some folder.

  • Unblock the program by right-click on its .exe, Properties, General tab, untick Unblock and then OK.

  • Start ExecTI and enter the command regedit.exe -m. This will open the Registry Editor running with TrustedInstaller permissions, so you may do the below registry modification.

  • Navigate to the Registry key
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID\{CDCBCFCA-3CDC-436f-A4E2-0E02075250C2}

  • Rename the value RunAs to anything, for example to RunAs_my. Deleting will also work, but renaming will allow to later easily undo this modification.

  • Close regedit and restart Windows 10.

  • To run Explorer as Administrator, right-click C:\windows\Explorer.exe and select 'Run as administrator', or create a shortcut set to run as Administrator.

harrymc
  • 498,455
1

Frame challenge

This answer to the question you linked suggests running an elevated Notepad.exe, then using the File/Open command, and using the mini-explorer that shows to perform Admin operations.

If that's not flexible enough (i.e. no multifile copy/paste) consider installing an alternative file manager that you can run elevated. I just tried with Explorer++, which is a single file portable app that is only 1.8Mb, and when run elevated I was able to do anything as admin.

Ross Presser
  • 1,470