No full control out of my own account? Weird system behaviour

Question

So, the problem is weird, at least in my eyes...

The story so far:

• I needed to restore a deleted file from my PC.
• In order not to have anything written over it and lose it permanently I shut down the PC and decided to plug my SSD C drive in an external HDD docking station, connect it to my W10 laptop and run ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery).
• I managed to get my files back, but when I reattached the SSD back to my system, I started having lots of weird things...

The symptoms so far:

• When booting the system, some programs that I've set to boot on system startup, don't boot.
• When I click on Start, nothing happens. The button just doesn't respond.
• When inside the Appdata/Roaming folder, when I try to get inside any of these folders, the message I get is that "You don't currently have permission to access this folder".
• When in my user's (Yes, I am admin) desktop I don't have permission to access the folders in my desktop. I edited the rights on one of these folders and I have full control and on this desktop folder everything is ok, but doing it for all the folders through the entire system would take forever.

What I have tried:

• chkdsk which run on system startup (didn't give me any feedback whether it fixed anything or not)
• sfc /scannow (No errors)
• I took ownership of my user's account, nothing changed.
• With my account, I cannot create a new account, so I tried a different user account that existed on my system, that one works just fine. No issues. So it seems like my account is problematic.

My version:

I feel like the system doesn't recognise my account as it was before unplugging my drive and plugging it to another system. Like something has changed on my account. (I know I should have used Read-only mode, but I didn't) It doesn't seem like a terrible error happening, only that I'm somehow shut out of my own system.

There should be a way to fix it, not to go down the formatting road that will take me 2 days to set everything from scratch...

Any help would greatly be appreciated... Thanks!

Answer 1

First of all, thanks to MichaelBay for his comment above. It was crucial to structuring the solution to all this.

So, I have a fix and these are the steps that I followed in order to fix this thing that had plagued my mind for the post days. Have in mind that I had luckily one more admin account (which has been working just fine all the time) lying around.

• Download from here the tool called Reset file permissions and put it on flash drive (thanks to MichaelBay)
• Enable safe mode boot (msconfig).
• Log in to the other account (since mine could not run eleveted cmd not even on safe mode).
• From that account enable built-in Administrator Account (at elevated command prompt: net user administrator /active:yes )
• Log out of all active accounts and log in as built in Administrator.
• Connect flash drive with the tool.
• Run it on my user folder in Users folder.
• Disable built-in Administrator Account, disable safe mode.

At that point most of the work was done. 95% of the system was fully working. There was a minor bug though. Some applications (like Winamp) could not run. The culprit was that some folder either in the %Appdata% folder, either Program Files was not under my ownership. So I had to take ownership manually on those folders and assign myself with full control.

Now everything is up and running!