mystery read only drive, can you help please

happyhero

Hi my father lives abroad and has a dual core PC and is running XP. We talk regular through Skype and he says he has a drive on his PC named drive J which is 515mb and is read only. He has looked at it and can find pictures and ordinary files on it. The pictures he says are of people he does not know. The PC he has had from new. He is running AVG8.

What can he do?
He wants to delete the stuff but what is this tiny drive?
Is it ok to delete what is on it?
If it is ok to delete, how would you do it, if it is read only?

Any help appreciated.

fwor

First thing to do is to find out whether it's a partition on his main disk or a separate drive.

If your father is like mine, I would guess the latter and that he's just left a memory card in one of the cardreader slots or a USB drive in one of the rear ports where it's not visible.

If you go into Control Panel, Admin Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management you'll be able to see whether it's a separate drive or not, and if it's removable.

There are quite a few ways that you could go about deleting/formatting it, but TBH I'd recommend you find out what/where it is before doing that. It could, for example, just be a memory card with the "write protect" tab enabled...

Airwolf1

Also check the properties of the drive to see when it was created. The date may trigger some memory of downloading a program or something.