Cannot delete folder, going insane

Yes, life and technology has changed. Both of my SFF cases running Win10 don't use NVMe drives and have no extra room for a second SATA drive, neither HDD or SSD. My main desktops could have more but I have only a second HDD for Data storage in them. I also have 2 x 4TB USB drives on one and a 2TB RAID 1 setup on my Router.

Ok thanks all! I decided to just move what I wanted to keep out of the drive, format it, and put it back. Hopefully the permissions thing won’t crop up again. If it does I’ll be back!

@zaarin_2003

Great job, well done!

Wisewiz said:

Is there any reason why simply putting all drives except the intended target OFFLINE in Disk Management wouldn't work just as well as physically disconnecting or removing?

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I think that would only hide the drive from Windows and would still be accessible in the BIOS when the computer starts or restarts.

Winuser said:

I think that would only hide the drive from Windows and would still be accessible in the BIOS when the computer starts or restarts.

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That makes sense. I was afraid there was something wrong with my idea. It seemed too easy to be right. Thanks for thinking about it.

Sorry I'm late for the party on this one (yes, I know you already formatted the drive), but an easy solution for this situation is to open a Cmd prompt with PowerRun.

You'lll then have TrustedInstaller level access. Assuming your old Windows drive is mounted as D: you can remove the old folders with the RD command in the PowerRun elevated Cmd window. For example: rd /s /q d:\windows

If you prefer a GUI, you can load up a file manager, such as Explorer++ from PowerRun to access and/or delete whatever you like (be careful).

@zaarin_2003

Have I missed something here --the other answers seem horribly complicated to what should really be a trivial problem.

the simplest way I'd imagine would be just to boot any Windows install disk and choose repair system -->command mode.

When in command mode simply start diskpart, select the windows disk (select disk xxxx), list vol, select vol xxxx, assign letter=Q

exit disk part. Now simply delete the file or folder (del q:\thestupidfile)

If that fails - no reason why it should - but if it does - boot up say a live image distro -- Linux Mint is probably the simplest for Windows users, in the GUI (the file explorer) just browse to the windows directory you want to delete and delete it.

Using a Windows install disk should be fine -- if you have Macrium (the stand alone recovery) you can boot that up and use the console (console icon at bottom) to do the same thing (diskpart etc).


cheers
jimbo