Watch out for “read-only” attributes when copying files from a CD

Posted by Vic Laurie
February 6, 2006

When you copy files from a CD the usual way, they will still have the read-only attribute that files on a CD normally have. If you ever want to edit these files, you will need to change the attribute. There are several ways to to do this.

One way is to use the command line and employ xcopy to do copying from CDs. Xcopy can automatically remove the read-only attribute during copying. Or you can use the command line and “attrib -r”. However, if you are unfamiliar with the command line, you can also change the attribute for files in a particular folder using Windows Explorer. Select all the files and right-click to bring up the context menu. Choose “Properties” and on the properties sheet, remove the check by “Read-only”.

If there are a lot of files and subfolders, using Windows Explorer can be pretty tedious, and I have written an easy-to-use little program that quickly removes the read-only attribute from the files in a folder and all its subfolders. It can be downloaded here. Download and unzip the single file to any convenient location. Assuming that you have the Windows XP scripting host installed (a standard setup in most home PCs) all that is required to run a program is to click on the file. Anti-virus programs typically warn about any VBScript but this file is harmless. The script does not change anything on the system and can simply be deleted if you don’t like it.

Command-line, File management

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