Deleting old system folders from a drive that is no longer the windows installation drive
- by grenade
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?