The last time I talked about Windows 10, it was after an update wiped out my operating system. Because I never thought about going to the Microsoft Store in town, I ended up loading Windows 7 instead and I moved on from there.

How we view our hard drives

Recently I read where all updates to Windows 7 were ending, and I decided it was time to go back to Windows 10. However, I also didn’t want automatic updates anymore, so I bought Windows 10 Professional. I got it at a discount; y’all know I wasn’t about paying $199 for it after all these years! 🙂

After I loaded Windows 7 on my computer back in November, I knew I needed a program to back up information from my hard drive moving forward because I literally lost everything… I wanted to cry! lol I searched around and decided to go with the IDrive Cloud Backup System; great price and easy to use. It’s backed up everything I’ve needed it to do since then, and now I had a chance to move everything back to my hard drive since I upgraded my operating system.

Except, for some reason, Microsoft thinks most of us are idiots. They hide file extensions from us that we actually need to know, and for some stupid reason they lock us out of our C: drive, which means we can’t add anything new to it. They think we’re the stupid ones, so they do stupid things.

Obviously, it’s important to get into our C: drive whenever we want to move something there that’s doesn’t entail loading a new program, which actually works. I keep my business files on my C: drive along with music files; this was problematic. I spent the equivalent of 18 hours looking for answers, and I finally found it. I’m sharing it here because every other place I went looking for the answer gave me the same instructions, none of which worked. This will work if you do what I say and find the same error message; time for the tutorial.

To save yourself time instead of doing what I was initially trying to do, take a file of any kind that you have somewhere else (maybe on a flash drive, micro SD, laptop, etc) and try to paste it to your C: drive. If it doesn’t work, you’ll probably get this error message: “Error 0x80070522: A required privilege is not held by the client“. This error message is crucial because the fix I’m giving you specifically addresses it. It might work for other reasons you can’t get into your C: drive, but I’m not guaranteeing it; maybe some of the instructions that everyone else is giving will work (and I do mean everyone else, as I found the same instructions on close to 75 pages; oy!).

Here’s the fix in its entirety. First you hit the Windows button and type “secpol.msc”. Once that’s open you follow this process: Local Security Policy; Local Policies; Security Options; User Account Control run all administrators in admin approval mode (that’s all one line), which will be near the bottom. Click on that last one and it’ll open a menu that shows “enable” or “disable“. Hit the disable button and apply then close. Reboot your computer and when you come back you’ll have total access to your C: drive.

I just saved you 18 hours if you found this article fairly quickly. Not only that, but I can tell you that after I got it open, I was able to transfer everything back to my drive, and when I reloaded all my programs they matched up with everything the way they were supposed to, which means I’m giving IDrive a great recommendation; it works great (I’m an affiliate for IDrive by the way; if you want to check it out, click that image on the right)! 😉 The only thing I’ll say is that you might not want to move everything at once because it could take a heck of a long time, especially if you have large files (like my music files).

Oh yeah; one of the first things I ended up doing was going into the settings and turning off automatic Windows 10 updates. I did that because during my initial download of files from IDrive, Windows 10 decided to update something and rebooted my computer without my knowledge, in the middle of my other download; weasels! I may keep getting that error warning saying they recommend I turn it on… but it ain’t happening!

I hope that instruction helps, and I hope you don’t mind my preamble. Let me know if it works for you if you encounter the same problem… which many of you will. 🙂