"You don't have permission to copy files to this location over the network" error

Question

I'm trying to copy a ~5 GB file to a folder on my D:\ drive from an XP machine and getting the following error:

You don't have permission to copy files to this location over the network.

It then suggests I copy to the Documents folder first. Copying to the Documents folder first would be all fine and dandy if I had 5 GB to spare on C, but I don't.

The D drive contains my old Windows 7 installation, and copying to these folders requires elevated permissions. Why am I prevented from copying directly to these folders?

Solution 1

I ended up finding a very detailed explanation here. It seems, in a nutshell, the problem lies in the fact that while my user account has been authenticated with the XP machine, my administrative account has not.

Network logins are stored by individual login sessions, meaning that as a user the network credentials are stored, but any elevated processes do not have the credentials. This creates a problem when trying to copy the file over the network, because to retrieve the file I must be a user, but to put the file in the D drive I must be an administrator.

User token:

• Can access network share
• Can't save in admin folders

Admin token:

• Has no stored credentials for network share
• Can save in admin folders

Adding my plain-old-user self (mymachine\tanner) to the permissions solved the problem.

Solution 2

Open up an administrative command prompt, then map the share again in this administrative context.

net use \\destserver\share /user:destserver\username password

Retry the copy/move in explorer.

Comments

[Nullpointer42]

To clarify, the source file is on the XP machine, and you're attempting to perform the copy from a Windows 8 machine, with the destination as the root of the D:\, running as admin, correct? Can you create files in your D:\ locally?

[rtf]

I'm authenticating through the domain with admin privileges, so it looks like this has nothing to do with the privileges on the XP machine.

[corwin01]

Yea. Can you check your permission on that folder and see what you do have?

[rtf]

I have full control. Only thing that is different is that I'm not the owner.

[corwin01]

Can you take ownership?

[rtf]

If you came here from Google: Please let me know if this answer explained the problem to you! This question is getting a lot of traffic, but I can't tell if I explained it well enough.

[Daniel K]

This is a better solution as it does not require any change to the destination share.