I’m an administrator on my VistaServer2008 computer but I can’t view any disk space information.

I’ve found another case where having UAC enabled will have some interesting results on what an administrator can do.

 

Symptoms;

UAC in enabled on my WS2008 machine. I am in the local administrators group but the local drive doesn’t have any security permissions for the local users group [Users (Server\Users)].

When I view the properties of the local drive there is 0 Used Space and 0 Free Space.

When I try to open a command prompt as an administrator it fails with “Parameter is incorrect”

The local Disk in my computer will have blank entries in total size and free space

Why does this happen?

When an administrator is logs onto a computer there are two tokens created, a full administrator and a standard user token. With UAC enabled the standard user token is used to view the disk info and since the Users group has no permissions on the disk it fails.

Here is a Doc

How to fix:

Grant the local users group permissions to the root of the local drive. Right click on the drive in explorer and select properties. Go to the security tab and click edit. Add the local users group and grant them at least “read” and “list folder contents” permissions.

Here is an old Doc about Permissions