How Do I Get Permission to Delete the Windows Folder?

Question

How Do I Get Permission to Delete the Windows Folder?

Orion K 10

I have a an external hard drive that I had previously used as the main drive on a scrap laptop that lacked an internal drive. Now, I am trying to use the same hard drive as an additional drive on my daily driver laptop.

Windows will not let me delete the massive "Windows" folder leftover on this drive, I cannot use this drive to its full storage capacity thanks to this undeletable & useless folder.

I have tried using force delete in cmd, I have tried disabling TrustedInstaller, I have tried changing the permissions on the folder. Windows gives me a series of "permission required" errors for the majority of the files within this folder when I try to give myself user permission to delete it.

How can I override TrustedInstaller & get that storage space on my drive back? Is there a way to tell Windows' protect me from deleting system files system that this is only an external drive & the prevention is unnecessary?

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Answer 1

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Answer 2

Jing Zhou 7,800 Microsoft External Staff

Hello,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

We suggest that you try the following steps to overwrite TrustedInstaller and delete this Windows folder:

Open the Command Prompt (CMD) to run as an administrator.

Transfer the ownership of the folder to yourself using the command takeown/f<path_to_windows_folder>/r/d y.

Use the command icacls<path_to_windows_folder>/grant administrators: F/t to give the administrator group full control permissions.

Then try deleting the folder. If it still cannot be deleted, use the command rd/s/q<path_to_windows_folder>to forcibly delete the folder and its contents.

These commands should allow you to overwrite TrustedInstaller and successfully delete the Windows folder.

Hope this answer can help you well.

Best regards，

Jill Zhou

Alubi 5 Reputation points

2024-08-06T00:54:31.55+00:00

When executing both given commands I receive the message "Access is denied"
Doom 0 Reputation points

2024-11-16T01:48:31.07+00:00

Hi there, I don't know if adding my question which is very similar, in as a comment here. Or if I should make a new post despite the similarity of the question.

So please let me know if I should do my own post instead.

Question:

How to I convince windows that I am the person it's saying I need permissions from in order to delete a windows.old folder that is simply taking up space on my computer.

This has been confusing and frustrating. Especially since the fixes are very straight forward and seem like they would work fine, but something is making my computer think I'm some outsider despite having ownership of, and overall admin privileges on the folder and all of its contents.

Every attempt I have made to transfer ownership, change permissions, delete, forcefully delete etc. Has ended up being insufficient to make this thing go away.

I followed at least 3 other guides now, and then I did everything listed here.

I attempted to do the steps of transferring permissions, which said it worked. I closed and reopened the advanced permissions from the properties of the file. I was clearly set as owner, with full permissions.

So, I tried to delete it again, and got access denied again.
I checked the user permissions again and I was still shown as owner... but I cannot modify or delete anything.

I used the rd /s <path> command, access denied again.
It executed correctly, but every single file that flew by on the cmd screen was access denied all the way through.

What is most confusing and frustrating about this issue is that it acts as though permissions have been successfully transferred to me...

Despite that however...

It still says access denied with all attempts to delete or modify.

It even went so far as to give an error stating that I require permission from [user profile] to delete, and it was ME... it was saying, you can't delete this, you have to get yourself to give permissions in order to delete this... Ok computer, excuse me while I ask me if it's ok for me to delete the file, the one that I just said I wanted to delete...

I don't understand what's going on there. Any help would be appreciated.
Yohan 0 Reputation points

2025-06-08T11:50:19.1666667+00:00

Format properly so you don't get an "access denied" even after following the instructions.

takeown /F C:*path to folder* /R /D Y

icacls C:*path to folder* /grant administrators:F /T

Replace "C: path to folder" with the full path you want to delete.

After running those two lines in the command prompt, just delete (or shift-delete) the file or folder via the windows explorer, as you would normally do.

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How Do I Get Permission to Delete the Windows Folder?

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