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Trying to delete a folder on an external hard drive. I get message: You'll need to provide administrator permission to delete the folder. I show that I have the permission.

Anonymous
2024-02-05T23:44:33+00:00

I am trying to delete a folder from an external hard drive. The folder is screwing up my back up service. When I try to delete the folder I get the message: You'll need to provide administrator permission to delete the folder. I have tried everything I know and I am showing I am the administrator. How can I get rid of this folder short of copying the good folders to another drive and reformatting the external drive.

Windows for home | Windows 11 | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-02-09T13:34:43+00:00

    Here is the correct run. For some reason it does not give me access to delete.

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  2. Les Ferch 10,341 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-02-09T00:17:11+00:00

    It looks to me like you opened PowerRun but didn't actually use it. That is, I think you started the Cmd prompt in the usual way by typing Cmd in the search box and then selecting "Run as Administrator".

    What you must do instead is double-click the item in the PowerRun window labelled %SystemRoot%\System32\cmd.exe. That will open a Cmd prompt with TrustedInstaller rights (the one that says "Hi world!").

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-02-09T00:04:12+00:00

    I do not get Hi World. See Screenshot. Is it because I am running Windows 11?

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  4. Les Ferch 10,341 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2024-02-08T18:00:45+00:00

    That's unexpected. The start of your session has scrolled off the top. Can you confirm that the Cmd opened like this:

    That is, after clicking on the cmd.exe item in PowerRun, it opened a Cmd window that says "Hi world!"? If so, that should mean that the window is opened with TrustedInstaller rights and should allow you to delete anything that's not currently in use.

    I can't see why those autorun.inf files would be in use and even if they're marked as Hidden, System, Read-Only, they should still get deleted with the rd command as TrustedInstaller. Very strange indeed.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-02-08T17:36:46+00:00

    I did change the name to Bad_Backup. Here is screen shot of response.

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