After restoring files from a backup on Windows 2008 I was receiving the message: “unable to display current owner”. To recursively change the owner on the folders right-click on the Command Prompt and choose “Run as Administrator” then use the command:
takeown /f "c:\folder\subfolder" /r
I also had to use the icacls command to actually add the user to the permissions for some of the files/folders so the following did everything I needed:
takeown /f "c:\folder\subfolder" /r /d y
icacls"c:\folder\subfolder"/grant administrators:F /t
