Delete old program files folder

I then try to delete either the Windows or Program Files folders on these drives, and get the message. The effective permissions for these folders lists this user has every right.

The absurd "answers" on the microsoft community of course offer things like "Use Disk Cleanup" which is a blatantly uneducated answer or "just reformat the drive" formatting avoids the problem rather than addressing it. Note 1 - OS Language: takeown Program Files folder may also be named differently.

Note 2 - Older versions of Windows: If icacls and rd are not supported then try use cacls and rmdir instead. The issue might be that you do not have the correct permissions in the discretionary access control lists DACLs for the folder and its content.

DACLs identifies the trustees that are allowed or denied access to a securable object. So simply giving the ownership to the folder might not be enough, but you also needs to grant permission in the DACLs.

You can grant permission using the icacls command as shown as example above. Note: The Y option may be different depending on OS language. Note: The group name administrators may be different depending on OS language. What worked for me was a simplified version of this suggestion :. NOTE: Now that I think about it, you should be able to start from step 4, you just need to hit the "change permissions" button to get access. I'd test, but I'm out of directories to delete.

You should now have the permissions needed to delete the files. Do so. Tested on both Program Files folders and Windows. For the icacls command, you need to use "administradores" Spanish and not "administrators" English. Simple rename Program Files to Windows.

Same trick work on any folder what you cannot remove. For windows folder If you can,change the name to windows. Then open disk cleanup,select the drive and click ok. After that click 'clean up system files' and it will delete the folder.

Now if you can't rename the folder,download unlocker,open it and select the folder then click rename and change the name to Windows. Create a live USB of your Linux distribution of choice, boot into that, mount the drives, and clean them up that way.

Literally the easiest way to do it. I could probably do some digging and figure it out. Its on the H: drive. Search In. Delete old Windows and Program Files folders? Share More sharing options Followers 0. Recommended Posts. Shadrack Posted November 17, Posted November 17, Sorry if this has been posted before. Between those installs and their Program Files there is a lot of space to reclaim.

Thanks for your help -shad. Do you like this post? You may also like 5. What if Copy and Paste are not working in Windows 10? Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Auslogics Blog. Ad Blocker Detected Ad blockers may interfere with some important blog features, such as comments, images, etc.

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Please see our Privacy Policy for more details. Great to see you among our subscribers! Ramhound I'm not saying it can't be made to mostly work; in fact, I do say just that. But it's an unsupported configuration and I wouldn't trust it to work in every conceivable even realistic scenario.

Chen mentions see the linked article that updates are done within file system transactions; just to take one example, what if there's a power loss during an update that touches files inside a moved Program Files x86 directory? Would the file system contents then be consistent as designed and tested? Perhaps, but seems unlikely. Star Star 11 2 2 bronze badges. The thing is dlls needed to windows to successfully load and for login.

After that I need to substitute it with symlink to another drive. The final goal is to make Program Files available from another drive by symlink. Well you can still delete your Program Files folder if you mount the drive on Linux or another copy of Windows. Vyacheslav If you have loaded DLLs from that folder, you cannot delete it. Show 4 more comments. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password.

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