Question

I’ve developed an ASP.NET v4 web app which I am trying to get to write to a folder in the webroot.

For the life of me I cannot get Windows 7 to allow it to write a file, I get Access is Denied error each time.

What I have tried on the folder is

attrib -r /foldernameandpath
attrib -r -s /foldernameandpath
Removing Check from ReadOnly attribute in folder properties
Changed owner to folder to current user whom is also the admin
Changed owner to Everyone
Adding Everyone user to folder with all permissions
Changing the folder to the Public Document directory
Changing to the root of the C drive (Out of desperation)

Nothing seems to work and all I want to do is test that the write works.

Now I know the system works and writes fine cause I had this same web app on a second machine writing the PDFs to the C drive without issue. This second machine I just cannot get it to allow the write.

Answer 1

Oh please for the love of all things holy, put the keyboard and mouse down and stop what you are doing. Some of the actions in your list seriously frightens me.
All the things you list as your actions are most likely useless or desperately random at best.
As a web developer, you shouldn’t have to start messing around changing ownership of folders, especially not the web root folder normally used by the web server. When you do, you’ll end up in a dark, cold and lonely place. Lord only knows what other desperate measures you have taken. For your own sake, I’ll recommend you to do a system restore or even system reinstall to make sure you are in a healthy state.

Let’s go back one step and try to sort out what you are doing.
First: what is the path you are trying to write to?
Second: are you running this application directly from within Visual Studio or in IIs?

If you are doing the first option then your current user account is the account who tries to write to the path in question. Do you have write permissions there?
One thing you can try is to start Visual Studio with elevated permissions and see if that works.
If you are running in IIs, it the associated pool account that needs write permissions.
Are you doing impersonation by any chance? If so, make sure the impersonated account have proper permissions.

You should only write to a predefined folder within your app path, like ..\App_Data for example.

The easiest way to find out which account you are running with and determine what path you are trying to write to, is to fire up SysIntenals process monitor and find the entry with the access denied result. Select properties for that entry and find out which account tried to do the write action. When you have determined that, right click on the folder in question and give the proper account write permissions.