Deleting old system folders from a drive that is no longer the windows installation drive

Posted by grenade on Super User See other posts from Super User or by grenade
Published on 2011-01-31T14:53:16Z Indexed on 2011/01/31 15:28 UTC
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windows-7

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filesystems

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delete

I dropped my laptop and was no longer able to boot. There were error messages about a corrupt boot record. Replacing the hard drive and reinstalling Win 7 was how I dealt with it.

The old drive still appears to be good and I can read and write to it when I connect it as a second drive and mount as D:. However, if I try to recover the space being used by the windows, programdata, program files & program files(x86) folders, by deleting them I get error messages about needing permission from trustedinstaller. If I set myself as the owner of the folders and retry the delete I get error messages about needing permission from myself! Since I'm pretty sure that I have permission from myself to delete the folders, I can only assume that the OS or file system has gotten its panties twisted.

I have tried shift, right click, delete from explorer and also if I run "del /f /s /q D:\Windows" from an admin command prompt, I get a succession of Access is denied messages as well.

How do I delete D:\Windows, D:\ProgramData, D:\Program Files & D:\Program Files(x86) from a drive that is not the Windows installation drive?

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