I have folder that has been moved into the 'WpSystem' Folder on my hard drive and I can't do anything to it.

Question

My steam file, that is very large and takes up tons of storage due to all the games I had installed has been moved into the 'WpSystem' folder don't know how but it's there. It's a 2tb hard drive and I can't do anything to it. I can't open it, move it, delete it, nothing. I feel like I've tried everything and nothing seem to work. When I try to do something like open the folder it is says 'Location is not available' and goes on to say it is 'not accessable' and 'The security ID structure is invalid.' At this point is it taking up most of the space on my hard drive so I was wondering if someone could help me in solving this problem, Thank you.

Answer 1

The WpSystem is reserved for use by Windows Store apps and even admins aren't supposed to muck with it. As such it is locked down by default. Unfortunately messing with this directory structure can cause issues so you need to be very careful. How Steam was moved there is beyond me because you don't have write permissions to that folder.

My recommendation is to use an elevated Explorer window to access the folder (you'll still likely get a warning) and then move the folder containing Steam back to where it was. If this fails then you don't have permissions even as an admin to do that and you need to take ownership. To do that right click the folder and go to Properties and then Security and finally Advanced. In the UI go to the Effective Access tab and enter your username to see what permissions you have. If you don't have enough permissions to read and write files and folders then grant yourself permissions. To avoid issues you may need to grant yourself this permission on just the WpSystem folder. Attempting to do so on subfolders will likely result in errors. Once you have permissions to RW the folder then go to the Steam folder and repeat the process but this time grant yourself RW to subfolders as well. Finally try moving the folder out of WpSystem. If that works then you can remove your permissions from the root folder again.

If that doesn't work then you might need to take ownership of the WpSystem. To do this go back to the same UI and change the owner to your own account. I believe it defaults to TrustedInstaller. Once you've done that then try the move again and if that fails then try granting your account permissions again (yes it seems redundant). After you have successfully moved the folder then you'll need to restore the owner to NT Service\TrustedInstaller otherwise you can run into issues.

Answer 2

I can say with 100% certainty that I have performed the steps in Michael Taylor's answer and they did not work until I restarted in Safe Mode, at which point I was able to move the folder that I had also accidentally dropped into WpSystem.