Undeletable folder structure

[Patrick Schoenbach]

Hi,

on an NTFS Partition, I have a folder structure with a few subfolders and 39 files, which I cannot delete because I either get "The system cannot find the file" or "Access denied". The files have no accessible securtity info. The trick of using the 8.3 name does not help either. No malware, chkdsk is fine.

Except from reformatting, how can I get rid of these folders?

 

[Digerati]

Without knowing more about the folders or their contents, I would be hesitant to delete them.

What I would try first is to rename the top folder. I would do something like this:

Current name: foldername
New name: foldername-delete-6-2-2019

Then use the computer for a few days and see if anything breaks. If something does, you can easily see what to name the folder back too.

If nothing breaks, you can try booting into Safe Mode and then see if you can delete it.

If still no luck, Unlock It (formally MoveOnBoot) will let you tag the files or folder then delete them early-on during the next boot cycle, before Windows or any application can set hooks in them.

 

[Patrick Schoenbach]

Did that already. Nothing breaks. Deletion on boot does not work. The problem is not that these files are locked by processes. The problem is that the files are treated as if they would not exist (although they have a size), and their SID seems to be corrupted and/or not accessible. If I try to set permissions, it says that the file does not exist.

 

[Digerati]

What if you boot from a thumbdrive?

 

[Patrick Schoenbach]

From a Knoppix Live CD, I got a lot of files deleted but not all. Is there a tool that can display the NTFS info in a human readable way in order to assess what is actually preventing the deletion?

 

[Digerati]

There used to be something like that way back in DOS days, but that was for FAT32. Not sure now but will hunt around for something.

 

[SleepyDude]

Hi,

Some questions:
- What is the Windows version you are using?
- Can you go deep on the folders/subfolder and delete only the files inside?

 

[Patrick Schoenbach]

Win 10 Pro.

No, either the file is considered to not exist or access is denied, depending on the operation I am trying. And the security tab says that the is no security info available.

 

[SleepyDude]

Did you try booting from the Windows DVD or flash drive and accessing the Recovery Environment and from there try to run chkdsk /r on the volume with the bad folders/files?

 

[Patrick Schoenbach]

chkdsk is clean. Are there tools to inspect the NTFS info in a human readable way on low level?

 

[Patrick Schoenbach]

All these files have an attribute "Reparse".

1. What does it mean?
2. Can it be changed?
3. How to delete these files?

 

[Patrick Schoenbach]

I tried

fsutil reparsepoint delete

but then, I get "Access denied".

 

[RolandJS]

Have you already tried booting a puppy linux and using its file manager to delete those pesky files and then the folders?
Oh, last post was june, probably solved by now :)