[SOLVED] Deleting old Windows folder on spare HDD

[Gyoung123]

Hi Guys,

So - I've recently run into an issue deleting the windows folder from my spare HDD. It seems to be partially deleted, and hence corrupted, which is an issue when booting and the PC tries to boot to the HDD instead sometimes. (I'm not sure why this happens periodically, but I've resorted to booting the PC first via SSD and THEN Plugging in the SATA cable to the HDD)

Either way, this windows folder is taking up space and it needs to go.

Things I've tried:

1. Placing myself as owner. I'm currently the only user on the PC, I'm listed as the file's owner, I'm listed as having full permissions, yet when I try to delete it says I need permission from "User-PC" (i.e. the account I'm on)
2. Renaming the folder to windows.old and running a disk cleanup, cleanup doesnt recognise it all.

There's only 1 partition on the drive and 1.5TB of other data, so I don't particularly want to format it.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Colif]

check your boot order with hdd attached, it shouldn't include the hdd. That would be one way to stop it trying to boot from the old partition.

shame it doesn't have its own boot partition as we could have just deleted it.

1. you might have made the files, but Windows can tell the user number which made this file isn't the same user as is trying to access them. Its special like that.
2. that is odd, even after setting it to look for system files?

see the answer here - https://superuser.com/questions/915173/delete-old-windows-program-files-from-second-drive