Feb 11

Delete Undeletable Files in Windows

Troubleshooting Add comments

There are files and directories in Windows that seem to impossible to delete and remove away. These persistent undeletable files and folders sometimes can’t even be accessed no matter what, even by an administrator, and you’re pretty sure that the files are not locked by running process. This situation always happen especially if you perform in-place upgrade from Windows XP or install Windows Vista on another partition or hard disk drive, leaving the old XP used partition with its own data.

For Files:

  • takeown /f file_name /d y
  • icacls file_name /grant administrators:F

For Directories (will perform action recursively):

  • takeown /f directory_name /r /d y
  • icacls directory_name /grant administrators:F /t

Links:

Comments are closed.

preload preload preload