“Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item” & fix
Tue-2011-07-19 1 Comment
A fellow admin asked me to look into one of his daily annoyances. Whenever he wanted to run a .bat file on a Windows Server 2003 server of a file share, he received the following error:
“Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item”
I tried to right-click and edit the file, but got the same error.
I check the file permissions, but there was nothing that stood out. I vaguely remembered having to fix this before, so a quick Google search pointed me into the right direction: Internet Explorer Advanced Security Configuration.
Uncheck it in the above screen to uninstall it.
Now, usually you’d have to restart the server before this would be effective. But you can also use this little trick:
Close all Explorer windows and finally kill the explorere.exe process from the task manager.
This will (kinda) restart the Windows ‘shell’ and the settings will take affect immediately.
Next, click File -> New Taks (Run…) from the task manager menu, type explorer and press Enter. Your Windows desktop will re-appear.
You’re done now.
When you try to run or open the file again, you’ll receive the usual warning message, so you can decide yourself if you want to run the file.
Please keep in mind that you disabled Internet Explorer Advanced Security Configuration. This is a potential security risk so only do this fix if you’ve though it over thoroughly!
Keep your servers up-to-date with patches, and make it a practice to not to use the (insecure) Internet Explorer to browse the web on the server. And NEVER install plugins like Adobe Flash Player or you’ll have handed yourself a much bigger security problem.
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