Problems deleting files

cottyh24

My laptop died on me last week and (to cut a long story short) I had to remove the hard drive and back it up on our PC then reinstall Vista. I fully expected all my documents to be gone when I logged on, but they weren't. They were in a backup file, along with all the old program files, windows files etc.

I have copied my photos and docs over to my new install of windows and am now trying to get rid of the backup folders that are taking up a lot of space on my hard drive. This is proving somewhat impossible as I keep getting a message saying I don't have permission to remove them. I am set up as an administrator, have changed my permissions to allow me to make the changes (to give me control of the folders), and even set up a seperate admin account and tried to delete them through this but it still won't let me.

Before I give in and wipe the hard drive and start again (which I don't want to do as it took me ages to get all my drivers back), is there anything I can do to get rid of them?

Thanks in advance.

tsstss7

hello try starting computer in safe mode and try to delete the folder then or if you still have problems take hard drive out and and connect to home computer and delete from there hope this helps worth ago any way

closed

take ownership of the folders

burn your data to dvd for backup

most laptops have a factory restore partition to make searching for drivers unnecessary

cottyh24

closed - thanks but I have taken ownership of the files but it still wont let me delete them. From what I've read this can be a particular problem in Vista and I am now at a loss as to what I can do, bar wiping the hd and starting again.

closed

did you take ownership of the whole folder structure and subdirectories and make sure they aren't readonly or system files/directories?

http://www.malwarebytes.org/fileassassin.php

cottyh24

I thought I had but I will have to double check. I'll look at the fileassassin page too and hopefully I can get this sorted. Thank you.