Hello, something happened to my desktop computer, the shop said that the motherboard is burned out and I hardly ever used this computer in the first place. I always use my netbook computer. What I decided to do was leave all the files I need to keep on the desktop hard drive and buy an external hard drive case for it. Done, it works great. The propblem is I want to clear out the hard drive now, but keep all the files that I want on here. Its a 500gb hard drive and 100 gigs are personal files I want to keep. My netbook only has a couple gigs free of space (Its a small SSD hard drive).

Now I plug the external hard drive in, and I was able to erase everything but "Program Files" and "Windows". I hit delete on them and it pops up with an error saying can not delete this. I tried to delete file by file and it seems like they are all locked, I even go to properties and it says they they are unlocked, so something it stopping my from deleting these files.

If I had the hard drive space on my netbook I would just copy my personal files to that, formal the external hard drive and move the files back to it, but I just dont have the space to do this.

I tried using so called free file shredding software to remove program files and windows files and it still did not work.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

We save all of our important files (pictures, etc.) that we want to save to a disc (CD or DVD). I do some occasional beta testing and have had to format hard drives many times. I have lost more than a few of my wife's files before I built my own computer. Sometimes the viruses can get to you too.

 

The problem is that Windows stops you from deleting those directories because it's where Windows and its program files live, and normally you don't ever want to delete them. However, in your case you actually do.

I can think of a couple ways to do this...

One depends on your comfort level with Linux. You could download and burn a bootable Linux rescue CD, mount the filesystems, and delete what you want. Linux will have no problem deleting what you want from the drive. If you aren't comfortable with Linux then I probably wouldn't recommend this approach.

Another option is to borrow/buy/buy-then-return another external hard drive.

Or else back stuff up onto CD's? Get a spindle of CDR's and start feeding them to your laptop.

 

You have to take ownership of the drive to take over the files.
Windows protects them otherwise.

There isn't really a simple way to do this. I would take it and borrow a friends computer to save the files, format the drive and transfer the files back.

Thats going to be the simplest way.
Start clean.

 

Free Utilities to Delete Locked / Undeletable / Busy / Currently Used Files (thefreecountry.com)

 

Some options:

1. Cloud storage -- I keep seeing things like Microsloth skydrive and other places that offer 'clouds' .

I personally don't trust them, but they would probably be OK to pop your stuff up there, verify it, and format your hard drive before retrieving them.

Don't know if anybody does a 100 gigs

2. As mentioned, do some CDs -- or more likely some DVDs -- if you have a burner, it's only about 11 DVDs.

3. Get one of the USB hard drives -- fifty bucks or so. Then you could probably use your existing HD to do backups. A new portable drive would probably be easier to take with you.

hj