Could not write to output file -- Access is denied

Question

I recently switched computers and copied all my projects over to my new local drive. I reformatted the computer I'm on now so it was pretty much a clean machine. Everything seemed to be working fine, but when I opened one of my projects that I had been running from my old machine, it would no longer compile, and I get the following error message: Could not write to output file 'c:\Users\user\Documents\Projects\RegressionWeb\OnetouchUpload\obj\debug\OneTouchUpload.dll' -- 'Access is denied.'

I'm getting an error like that for each project I have in my solution. I'm also getting this error: Unexpected error creating debug information file 'c:\Users\user\documents\projects\RegressionWeb\RegressionWeb\obj\Debug\RegressionWeb.PDB' Access is denied

I've searched high and low, and the only similar issues I could find online related specifically to ASP.NET and IIS, neither of which has anything to do with my project (My projects are class libraries of mostly NUnit tests with some support classes).

I am the administrator on my local machine. I have already taken ownership of every file in the project using takeown /f .\RegressionWeb /r /d y and also tried to ensure that nothing had a status of Read-only, but the following file threw an error when I tried changing the read-only property of it's parent folder: An error occurred applying attributes to the file: C:...\Regressionweb.sln.DotSettings.user Access is denied

Basically this project was working perfectly and had no errors from my old computer. After copying over everything, this DotSettings.user file will not be modified, and Visual Studio can't write to any of the dll files. I'm sure the answer must lie in a Visual Studio setting somewhere. Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I think Karl has it right. I had a similar situation once, and what I did was delete the file in question, clean the solution, and then rebuild. If the project needs that file it should recreate it; in my case it didn't need it because it never recreated it, but the project ran just fine.

One other thing I would recommend; you may be selecting the read-only attribute of the parent folder off and selecting this setting to recurse through all sub-folders and files, but that doesn't mean that's what's happening. For all your sub-folders and files (especially the ones that are cropping up as errors) inspect each one individually and make sure the read-only attribute is off.

Answer 2

I was able to get this working by closing Visual Studio and then opening it again, but being careful to run Visual Studio "As Administrator". To do this, from the Start menu, right click on Visual Studio and choose "Run as Administrator".