MahlerIsGod

So I created a folder to house some pics before I could find a permanent home for them. Now I can't delete it. I cannot rename it, I tried deleting it in safe mode but nothing. Have I overlooked a simple yet effective solution? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

__________________
"But a work of art is a conscious human effort that has to do with communication. It is that or its nothing. When an accident is applauded as a work of art, when a cult grows up around the deliciousness of inadvertent beauty, we are in the presence of the greatest decadence the West has known in its history."

mikec

try start, run, then hit the browse button and try to delete it from that box. don't ask me why but I've seen that work before on "undeleteable" files/folders.

__________________
Until the 20th century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the charted electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one millionth of reality

Holo

I have the permanent folder problem too. I have tried deleting it from Linux and everything and it won't budge. I'mma format the drive in the future-that'll get rid of it.

__________________
I happen to like the words "fuck", "cock", "pussy", "tits", "cunt", "twat", "shit" and even "bitch". As long as I am not using them to describe you, don't go telling me whether or not I can/should use them...that is, if you want me to continue refraining from using them to describe you. ~Prince

nash

WTF! It actually worked on this file I've been trying to get deleted for years. It was this half downloaded movie off Kazaa. I reinstalled an OS on another partition of my hard drive and I still couldn't delete it. How the hell does that work??

Polyphobic

When this has happened to me, it's caused by out of wack file permissions.

__________________
<--The great infidel-->

intecel

File Permissions, bad sectors on the drive, and most importantly, the FAT tabes getting all hosed up.. I had this happen once... the drive started clicking, and crashed soon after.

mikec

didn't I say not to ask me why? hehhee j/k

__________________
Until the 20th century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the charted electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one millionth of reality

MahlerIsGod

Unfortunately, that didn't work. It is still on my system. That comment above about bad sectors on my disk has got me thinking that I should do some maintence work on this drive: check for errors, defrag, etc. Maybe that will work? Possible? Thanks though for the suggestions.

__________________
"But a work of art is a conscious human effort that has to do with communication. It is that or its nothing. When an accident is applauded as a work of art, when a cult grows up around the deliciousness of inadvertent beauty, we are in the presence of the greatest decadence the West has known in its history."

Dilbert1234567

it could be a redirect to a hidden dir on the HD, if you got rid of it good.

__________________
Donate Blood!

"Love is not finding the perfect person, but learning to see an imperfect person perfectly." -Sam Keen

Dragonlich

You could try checking the permissions. Follow the steps that Microsoft lists:

1) Click Start, and then click My Computer.
2) On the Tools menu, click Folder Options.
3) On the View tab, click Show hidden files and folders.
4) Clear the Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) check box. Click Yes when you are prompted to confirm the change.
5) Clear the Use simple file sharing (Recommended) check box.
6) Click OK.
7) Right-click the System Volume Information folder in the root folder, and then click Properties.
8) Click the Security tab.
9) Click Add, and then type the name of the user to whom you want to give access to the folder. Typically, this is the account with which you are logged on. Click OK, and then click OK.

----------------
I got this info from their page about <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=309531">access to the "system information folder"</a>, which I wanted to delete. It was copied from another partition, and was useless. However, I strongly urge you to be VERY careful about removing folders or files that are protected in this way. Unless you are really sure it's not needed, I suggest you leave things alone. You could easily destroy your windows installation, or possibly erase your harddisk.

Fearless_Hyena

To fix disk errors, run Scandisk if you're using Win95/98/98SE or run:
CHKDSK /F

from the command line in Win2k or XP.
CHKDSK /R will also perform a surface scan but that could take a while.


*Do Not Defrag* if you suspect any disk errors, that could make them worse! All defrag does is speed up disk access time, it does not fix errors at all and will very likely make them worse if they aren't detected.


You said that even deleting this folder in Safe Mode doesn't work, so see if you can reset the file permissions. If there's still no luck, and you're comfortable with the command line, try the following:

Ignore the rest here if you aren't very experienced with the DOS commandline -- all this may be a little complicated. But it's a neat trick if you understand what's going on here -- one last trick would be to see if you can run cmd.exe under SYSTEM privileges instead of normal user privileges, and set permissions or delete the files from the command line in the SYSTEM context. It gives you more permissions and will let you do some things that Windows normally wouldn't let you do otherwise, so while it could be useful it also could be dangerous, but it will probably work. To do this, type:

AT 16:00 /INTERACTIVE CMD.EXE /K
at the command-line.

This means that at 4:00pm (choose some time a minute or 2 away, military time) the AT scheduler will pop up a new cmd.exe window but this time it will be running as a SYSTEM process. Then in this new window that pops up, you can delete those files or use the cacls command to edit the folder permissions, and then delete using Explorer or something. For example, type:

cacls "c:\bad folder\" /t /e /g Administrators:f
in this new window to grant Full Control to the Administrators group for the folder (replace "c:\bad folder" with the path of the folder in question). Then if you're logged on as Administrator you should then have the permissions to delete that folder.

Another example, Here's how I would do this for My Documents on my own computer specifically:
cacls "E:\Documents and Settings\user\My Documents" /t /e /g Administrators:f



Or do what Dragonlich said.


Good luck!