Cannot delete a folder in External HDD

[alexBB]

Vista's is hard ways, I'll tell you. I am a developer working with Ultimate, VS2005, SqlServer, VFP9, etc although still my knowledgebase is not sufficient to deal with some of the problems. Day before Christmas I tried to "refresh" XP on one of my secondary partitions and as a result lost Vista references in the Bios and at the start menu there was no Vista for me to log in. I had to reinstall Vista again, actually this is the third time. Before it was for a different reason, also MS related.

I will address this problem which is still nagging in a separate post but now is this. I want to clean up one of my External HDD and reformat it as NTFS since I cannot do any system backup on FAT. I got a folder there with this name: 2801e0d4d586efe20e that I cannot delete no matter what I try.

I have now no recollection where this darn folder came from, I mean I copied it from some system months or years ago. It could even be Win2K or a WinServer2003. I get access denied all the time.

I right click on the folder, Properties==>Security Tab==> am able to add myself as a user. Give myself full rights, I am the Administrator, I am a part of the Administrators Group. I can even remove both users (groups), do Advanced. I changed the owner, now it is me, gave full rights. Nothing helps.

This folder is full of MS hotfixes. I do not understand why I "saved" it.

I need to get rid of it.

Please, help.

[gosh]

Uncheck box to inherit from parent, use winfile.exe from NT4, run cacls (or whatever it's called in vista) to see the permissions on it

-gosh

[alexBB]

Uncheck box to inherit from parent, use winfile.exe from NT4, run cacls (or whatever it's called in vista) to see the permissions on it

-gosh

Thank you. I am not at that computer now, will be there in an hour but it is my recollection that threre was a clear sign in that column <not inherited> and I still could not do it.

I think what you call calcs is gpresult.exe or/and gpupdate.exe in Windows\System32

This has become a major issue, hopefully we will be in touch I am not sure this issue is so esay to resolve. There are other facets to it too.

[alexBB]

Uncheck box to inherit from parent, use winfile.exe from NT4, run cacls (or whatever it's called in vista) to see the permissions on it

-gosh

Hi, unless I misunderstood you, your advice does not work at all. There is no checkbox to uncheck anywhere. When I go all the way thru Properties and many daughter windows I see a window that says that it is not inherited. I mean that main folder. I checked some subfolders: the same story. There are somehotfixes, the same story there. None of htem have owners but I can assign myself, no problem. It does not move me a step further. The overall folder is "owned" by me but the system does not give a ****.

What I've discovered is kind of scary.

I went thru my registry keying for "J:" which is the letter for my external HDD. I am about to replace it with 500Gb MyBook WD, I want to format it before I do. So I went thru the registry and discoveredd that Vista apparently has been using this HDD as a storage for temporary files while installing APIs I download from MS, like silverlight, etc. Some of the events are relatively new.

It appears those temporary files were stored in a separate J:\Temp\ folder which is either not there (deleted by Vista after each download) or I deleted it yesterday without giving it even a it short shrift.

So far I could not discover any references to the folder I am trying to delete but I am wondering if this could be something of similar nature.

Any ideas as to what I should do?

[razormoon]

I just use a bootable OS emergency disk and format from there or better yet, a bootable HDD utility/maintenance CD that comes with any hard disk package. In most cases it doesn't matter if the utility/maintenance software is from a different manufacturer than the HDD. Give it a try.

[alexBB]

I just use a bootable OS emergency disk and format from there or better yet, a bootable HDD utility/maintenance CD that comes with any hard disk package. In most cases it doesn't matter if the utility/maintenance software is from a different manufacturer than the HDD. Give it a try.

Yep, this is what I am trying to set up right now. Bought WD MyBook x 2 for my systems. They have sales. It is for the future though. The problem I am facing is different. This HDD does not appear to be usable for my purposes unless I reformat it.

Yep, Just finished installing WD Mybook on one of my systems, opened up the user manual and whoops, it is formatted to FAT32. Catch-22 all over again as Yogi Berra would say.

Edited December 28, 2007 by alexBB