Help deleting old Files

[Kyle Kos]

When I first built my PC, I used only a Seagate 1TB HDD, but I later upgraded to a 240gbSSD with plans to use the HDD for mass storage. Now I'm trying to remove unneeded files like the old windows installation from my HDD without formatting it, because I've got over 300GB of personal files, but I've got no external hard drive big enough to fit it all. Whenever I try to delete something from it that windows sees as "Important", it gives me a message saying I need permission from "desktop-hft01d9\administrator", But when I go into the security tab and give myself Admin Privileges over the drive, windows gives me an error and excludes windows folders. Any Ideas?

 

[Colif]

can you show me a screen shot of disk management? was the hdd attached when you installed the ssd?

you could remove ssd from power,
boot off the win 10 installer you used to put it on ssd,
follow the steps of this Guide to step 13,
only delete the partitions you don't want to keep and then close out of installer (hit the X at top)
and turn PC off,
then reconnect SSD

but don't do that until you show disk management or if ssd was only drive in PC when it was installed. Deleting the wrong partitions could leave you unable to boot ssd otherwise.

 

[bogdansv]

You can take ownership of those folders (and subfolders) from the Security tab -> Advanced -> Ownership and afer that you can do pretty much what you want with those files. Remember to KEEP your Users folder if you have files in there. Just delete your Windows folder from the old HDD and maybe the Program Files folder if you don't have anything important in there.

 

[Kyle Kos]

You can take ownership of those folders (and subfolders) from the Security tab -> Advanced -> Ownership and afer that you can do pretty much what you want with those files. Remember to KEEP your Users folder if you have files in there. Just delete your Windows folder from the old HDD and maybe the Program Files folder if you don't have anything important in there.

I've done this already, but Windows won't let me take control of windows installation files on the HDD.

 

[Colif]

windows is like that, it can tell what the files are and it protects them even if they not the current install. Its why I suggested the other way. You could also boot from a Ubuntu live CD and delete the files using it as it doesn't care about windows permissions

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/