Changing Disk volume ownership

[Jason Irons_1]

Hi Everyone

I have a couple of disks which were initialized with a specific person’s ownership rather than system and need to correct this.
Now, I should know this myself but don’t. How do you change disk ownership without having to take the volume off-line? I've managed to successfully update ownership on all files except indexf.sys using set file/owner.

Appreciate your input.

Regards

Jason

[Hein van den Heuvel]

May we assume you tried SET VOLUME /OWNER ?

(Sorry no test system running just now).

Hein.

[Hoff]

Short of directly patching the low-level disk structures, the only way I know to change the ownership of the INDEXF.SYS index file is to reinitialize the whole disk; AFAIK, the SET VOLUME/OWNER command won't reset the INDEXF.SYS ownership.

You can use BACKUP /NOINIT /IMAGE over onto the newly-initialized disk volume, etc. I tend to use INITIALIZE /SYSTEM ... here.

This can also be an opportunity to reset volume attributes, such as the numbers of headers or the disk cluster size, for instance.

[Martin Hughes]

Looks like you can do it with set security;

GONDOR_MKH>> d/sec data:[000000]indexf.sys

Directory DATA:[000000]

INDEXF.SYS;1 2144/48492 11-AUG-2004 13:59:24.50 [SYSTEM] (RWE,RWE,RE,E)

Total of 1 file, 2144/48492 blocks.

GONDOR_MKH>> set file/owner=tsg_mkh DATA:[000000]INDEXF.SYS
%SET-E-READERR, error reading DATA:[000000]INDEXF.SYS;1
-SYSTEM-W-ACCONFLICT, file access conflict

GONDOR_MKH>> set sec/owner=tsg_mkh DATA:[000000]INDEXF.SYS

GONDOR_MKH>> d/sec DATA:[000000]INDEXF.SYS

Directory DATA:[000000]

INDEXF.SYS;1 2144/48492 11-AUG-2004 13:59:24.50 [SYSMGR,TSG_MKH] (RWE,RWE,RE,E)

Total of 1 file, 2144/48492 blocks.

[John Gillings]

Jason,

If the volume ownership has been set successfully with SET VOLUME/OWNER, and all files except INDEXF.SYS with SET FILE/OWNER, does it matter that INDEXF.SYS is (apparently) owned by someone else? On the system I checked, the volume is owned by SYSTEM ([1,4]) but all the files 11 files at the top of the disk, like INDEXF.SYS, are owned by [1,1]. I suspect the security & ownership on those files is probably irrelevant as all working accesses are too low level for it to matter. The only possible issue might be that the specific user may have some kind of elevated access.

If that's a concern, it may be simpler to force that user onto a different UIC and change ownership of all their legitimate files than risk a backup and restore of the data (which will break your requirement of not taking the volume off line anyway).

[Jason Irons_1]

Thanks to Martin and everyone else for your assistance and advice.

Set security has done the trick.