Question I messed up Windows 10 - - - what now ?

[Gamer789]

It started with me trying to make room on Disk C to download AMD software. I copied and pasted ProgramFiles to another disk to make room temporarily. That didn't seem to go well. Permission asked, denied. A big mess.

After a restart, I got a black screen for a while and then went to desktop.
Right clicking on Disk C makes the blue circle appear and nothing opens. Clicking on windows bottom left does not open the menu. and everything seems to run slower when trying to browse files.

I have no backup because I didnt expect such complications.
When I try to delete the Program Files in C, it says I need permission from SYSTEM, but again, right clicking to go into the settings doesn't work.

What now folks? Thanks in advance.

 

[Lutfij]

What now folks?
Run System Restore to a point before you ruined the OS.

A side note, if you need space in your C drive, you should either increase the size of your C drive partition or get a larger drive or get a larger drive and move all things that aren't OS related to the larger drive.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I copied and pasted ProgramFiles to another disk to make room temporarily.
When I try to delete the Programfiles in C, it says I need permission from SYSTEM, but again, right clicking to go into the settings doesnt work.
What now folks?

I don't think System Restore protects against such [not very smart actions].

Do repair install.
Prepare windows 10 install media and run setup, choose upgrade option.

To free up space, you could:

turn off hibernation - this removes hiberfile.sys from OS drive (size of physical ram),​

relocate virtual memory pagefile.sys to a different drive,​

move user files to a differnt drive - like downloads/movies/music/other user content,​

uninstall some (no longer used) software.​

All those would have been fine options and wouldn't break anything.

 

[Gamer789]

I don't think System Restore protects against such [not very smart actions].

Do repair install.
Prepare windows 10 install media and run setup, choose upgrade option.

To free up space, you could:

turn off hibernation - this removes hiberfile.sys from OS drive (size of physical ram),​

relocate virtual memory pagefile.sys to a different drive,​

move user files to a differnt drive - like downloads/movies/music/other user content,​

uninstall some (no longer used) software.​

All those would have been fine options and wouldn't break anything.

What if I don't have a physical copy of windows. Bought the pc with it already installed.

 

[USAFRet]

What if I don't have a physical copy of windows. Bought the pc with it already installed.

Create your own, on a blank 8GB or larger flash drive.

Download the MediaCreation tool.
The first part of this outlines that process...

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

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