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Tired of this?

and this…

In Windows you will find that files copied to your local drives are not trusted until you right-click on them and in the properties click the ‘Unblock’ button. This is all very well for one or two files, but gets extremely anoying with more and also being a server admin on a helpdesk, having to take thousands of calls related to THIS!. It turns out to be related to NTFS’s ability to allow alternate data streams.

So here is a simple method of mass or bulk unblocking files.

  1. Download the Sysinternals Streams.exe from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897440.aspx
  2. I find Sysinternals so useful I create a ‘SysInternals’ folder on my C: drive and then put this into my ‘path’ environment variable so that I can run them from anywhere. However, if this is too much then the easiest is to copy the streams.exe to the root folder you wish to have files unblocked.
  3. In a command windows (with Admin privileges), use ‘cd’ to navigate to your folder.
  4. Type the command ‘streams –s –d subfoldername’ and press enter.