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Why can't I delete old Windows folder on hard drive?

B

bovinda

Senior member
I transferred a hard drive that had a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium installed on it to another computer so it could act as a backup drive. But now I can't delete the "Windows" folder off of the drive.

Before you jump to the "did you set permissions and owndership?" question, yes, I have done both of those.

I've logged in to the only account on the computer, which is of course an administrator account. I've set ownership to the name of the account "User (Computername/User)", including all subcontainers (the owner was TrustedInstaller previously). I've set permissions to include full-control.

But when I try to delete, it first says "You'll need to provide administrator permission...", so I select Continue. Then it says "You require permission from Computername/User to make changes to this folder." I can click Try Again forever, but it makes no difference. What am I doing wrong?

This computer is using Windows 7 Pro 64. Any ideas? 😕
 
Have you tried to delete in Safemode?

Have you tried to launch a Linux live CD have it mount the drive and then delete the folder?

Worst comes to worst, move important data, format, move important data back.
 
I did try in Safe mode, it didn't help. I have not tried the Linux CD - never tried that before.

I was thinking of just moving everything else off the hard drive, it's just a pain moving around 900 GB of data to get to that 70 GB portion to format the drive. But maybe that's what I'll have to do.
 
bovinda said:
I did try in Safe mode, it didn't help. I have not tried the Linux CD - never tried that before.

I was thinking of just moving everything else off the hard drive, it's just a pain moving around 900 GB of data to get to that 70 GB portion to format the drive. But maybe that's what I'll have to do.
Click to expand...

You might also want to try safemode command prompt with no networking. Navigate and delete.

Linux CD (or USB) should mount the drive and you can delete anything on the drive. No need to install anything, just boot from the CD or USB drive and you are good to go.

Now that I think about it, the drive still has a boot sector (technically you could boot it on the same hardware), so the format is probably the best option. Shouldn't take more than 1 hour to copy over to another drive via USB 2.0. 3.0 would be faster.
 
Yeah...I'm moving the files now. It's taking like an hour and 45 min, but then I'll be able to just clear it off and move on with life. Thanks for thinking through it with me.
 
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