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Possible Duplicate:
Basics about file/folder permissions on Win 7

2I have a laptop that's about a year old, and right after I got it I moved the built-in HDD to be its secondary drive and added an SSD as the primary drive with windows 7 & ubuntu. I kept the OED windows installation on the hdd in case something went wrong, but now the drive is almost full and those are taking up ~ 40GB and I want to delete them.

When I try to delete them, it just says "You need Administrator access", I click yes, and it fails with another popup whose only option is "try again" (I do have full admin access on this machine). So I right click on one of the folders e.g. Program Files, choose properties -> security -> edit but all the allow & deny checkboxes are greyed out for all of the users.

Of course all the help menu links are useless, the similar questions on microsoft forums are dead ends that just tell you to use system restore, etc. Is there any way to force delete these folders? It seems like kind of a ridiculous question to have to ask, but then again windows is kind of a ridiculous system and I wouldn't be surprised if there's no way to do this short of reformatting the drive. But if someone does know of a way, I would be very grateful.

Community
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danny
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1 Answers1

4

Try the command line of taking ownership and setting permissions.

a. Go to > Start > All Programs > Accessories

b. Right-click on Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator.

c. Type the following command and press Enter key:

takeown /f [path to folder] /r /d y

EDIT:

if that does not help try resetting permission on the entire drive

  1. For an entire storage drive or partition, do not use this on the system drive

example is usb drive D: run 2 commands, first sets the target drive, second resets the permissions for the target drive D:

D:

.

icacls * /T /Q /C /RESET

.

Once permissions are reset see if you can delete or take ownership if needed.

.

Moab
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