In a (Windows) command prompt you type "cd C:\Users\msmith", the output is "Access is denied." How can you overcome this issue.
Run "chkdsk" to see if there are issues with the file system
Run cmd.exe as an Administrator
Use the "dir" command instead of cd to force access to the directory
Use "chmod a+r C:\Users\msmith" to give all users read rights to the folder
Correct Incorrect Unanswered
Answer Description
Running cmd.exe as an admin will give you the elevated privileges to view another user's folder in most instances. "chkdisk" is for checking file system integrity and does not directly deal with file permissions. "chmod" is a Linux tool and will not work on Windows systems. "dir" is used to display the contents of a directory, not change the working directory.
Wikipedia
User Account Control (UAC) is a mandatory access control enforcement feature introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems, with a more relaxed version also present in Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 10, and Windows 11. It aims to improve the security of Microsoft Windows by limiting application software to standard user privileges until an administrator authorises an increase or elevation. In this way, only applications trusted by the user may receive administrative privileges and malware are kept from compromising the operating system. In other words, a user account may have administrator privileges assigned to it, but applications that the user runs do not inherit those privileges unless they are approved beforehand or the user explicitly authorises it.
UAC uses Mandatory Integrity Control to isolate running processes with different privileges. To reduce the possibility of lower-privilege applications communicating with higher-privilege ones, another new technology, User Interface Privilege Isolation, is used in conjunction with User Account Control to isolate these processes from each other. One prominent use of this is Internet Explorer 7's "Protected Mode".Operating systems on mainframes and on servers have differentiated between superusers and userland for decades. This had an obvious security component, but also an administrative component, in that it prevented users from accidentally changing system settings.
Early Microsoft home operating-systems (such as MS-DOS, Windows 95-98 and Windows Me) did not have a concept of different user-accounts on the same machine. Subsequent versions of
User_Account_Control - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 