guys, this is getting out of hand. i like many suffer from the horrible "read only" bug on windows 7. on every reboot, windows 7 sets one of my hdds to read only. the whole disk. the only way to correct is to use diskpart and clear the readonly attributes. of course i'm an administrator on the system. uac is turned off. steps i have taken to correct the issue. 1. copied the entire contents of the drive to another drive, reformatted the "problem drive" under window7 (full format). re-copied the contents. 2. as above but using a newly created, seperate administrator account 3. reset all of the attributes (diskpart), and then manually gone into the security tab of the drive and forced "full control" to the administrators group (diskpart), and then added my user account specifically with full control using the security tab 4. bashed my head on the desk, sprinkled fairy dust on the floor, spun around three times, rebooted 5. turned uac back on, rebooted, corrected using diskpart, rebooted 6. turned uac back off, rebooted, corrected using diskpart, rebooted 7. using disk management, unloaded, then reloaded the drive to a different path 8. copied all of the contents off, remapped, reformatted (did not copy file contents back) 9. copied all of the contents off, remapped, reformatted (did not copy file contents back) performed chkdsk (no errors) 10. booted into alternate administrator account, deleted the user account, created a new user account i'm NOT resorting to using a startup batch-file like others on the net have done - i'm not going back to dos coding to fix windows 7. the disk is fine, throwing into a vista and xp machine it works flawlessly (it was brand new for the install). My system is configured thus: c: intel 160gb ssd with windows 7. ntfs d: bluray drive e: f: 2x raptor 74gb in raid for scratchdisk, pagefile and temp folders. ntfs g: 2x raptor 74gb in raid for adobe scratch disk and application installs where speed not so crucial. ntfs s: raptor 300gb for varied tasks. ntfs t: (remapped from e:) the trouble disk. wd 1tb black caviar with my documents. ntfs dfi lanparty mobo 8gb ram nvidia 275 creative xfi soundcard norton 2010 secutity all microsoft windows 7 native drivers for devices save for nvidia latest stable release and x-fi. windows update complete and up to date.

There actually is a real solution. You need to re-take ownership of your files and folders. There is a registry hack that will enable you to do this quite easily. Check it out at: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-take-ownership-to-explorer-right-click-menu-in-vista/ (Says Vista but works for Win7 too.) Once you've installed this hack and used the contextual menu to take ownership at the appropriate folder level, the Read-Only problem will disappear.

For me the question is: Why the BL#@#^ He## is Windows doing this? This is a REAL big pain in the ass. I never know when it is going to mark a disk read only. Adding the "take ownership" to the context menu is not a fix, unless this somehow proves to be permanent. Microsoft needs to document and broadcast why this keeps happening and release a patch to prevent it from happening again. zero2espect, JMicron's site shows a driver for the JMB361 which resides on my board dated 6/15/2011. They do not offer any sort of BIOS update that I can find, except for those who have their JMB363 add-on cards for which they do have an Option ROM update - dated 6/24/2011. So if you can actually point us to this bios update reputed to fix this, it would be appreciated. Mike

Have you ever considered the possibility that it is a JMicron problem, not a Windows problem?Bill

Anything is possible, however, the problem began recently (for me) and I haven't added/updated any m/b or sata related software in a while. I don't believe that JMICRON has any way to push software onto my machine. Also, as I noted about, despite what another stated as a possibility about a bios update from JMICRON, I don't find any such software on their site, nor would they seem likely to be producing a bios update for the bios's of all the different motherboards out there which have their controllers ... the only bios updates they appear to be producing is for the options ROM add-on controllers they produce, something I do not have. People providing things like chipsets and sata controllers provide drivers, not BIOS updates. So, I have a new problem on a well-established system which has not had any software updates relevant to the JMICRON controller, suddenly develops a problem where the SATA drives keep getting set to readonly by something in the system to a device which (at the time) the Windows SYSTEM entity is/was the sole owner. You tell me? I am all ears.Mike