I’ve installed windows vista on my D:\ partition . Now I’m back in my C:\ winXP partition and I’m trying to delete the following vista folders:
Windows
Program Files
ProgramData
Users
But I get an “access denied” message when I try that. Their properties say they are Read-Only and when I try to remove the restriction, I also get “access denied”.
I can’t format D:. I have a lot of other stuff in there that I want to keep. Backing it up is not an option either. I have 200 GB of data in there. I just want to delete those pesky folders.
Following the procedure here should allow you to delete them, even without knowing which program or process is preventing access. If these are windows system files which are currently in use by the system, you won’t be able to delete them this way. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case, though.
I used a slight variation of that method and it mostly worked (some files still retained their attributes and required individual attention). I’ve only got 7 megs of garbage to deal with now.
Thank you all for your help. And remember, It’s all about ownership and security with NT.