It's annoying when the things designed to protect us just get in our way. Today I was doing some work on our file server and wanted to check out some ways to see how much disk space was being used by certain clients without having access to their folders (I'm still not sure if that's possible, but this happened along the way). In searching around I discovered the fsutil tool and wanted to play with it a bit. I used remote desktop to log in to our administrative server, opened a command window, and typed an fsutil command. The error that was returned to me was:

The FSUTIL utility requires that you have administrative privileges.

At which point I wanted to scream - But I Am an Administrator.

So, I looked around to make sure. Yes, I was in the Domain Admins group which was in the Administrators group. Looked like I was good to go. I had logged in with my admin account rather than my normal user accout. Hmm, what was up?

I searched on Google and thankfully came across a comment in this post that reminded me that Windows 2008 requires you to explicitly run the command window as an administrator. I right-clicked on the cmd icon, selected Run as Administrator, and voila! the fsutil command ran. Not that it gave me the information I wanted, but it ran.