How do I delete thse files from my harddrive?

Question

I had a comptuer that died.. I then got a new computer and added the old harddrive as an axillliary drive. Now, on the this old harddrive there were multiple users and one of them was password protected.. and when I tried to access the password protected user files it said access denied.. and there was no way to put in a password. So I got this software that allowed me to copy those protected files.. but now I want to delete those old files without reformatting the entire disk.. is there any way to do this?

when I right click and try to delete it says "access denied".. that's the problem...

I would try to reformat the harddrive but It's about half full with files I don't want to delete, and I don't have the space to back them up right now..

Answer 1

The best way to remove those files and user accounts would be to make your old drive the primary drive and boot up into Windows on that drive (hopefully it's still fully installed and active from your old computer), sign-in under a full access administrator account that you have rights and a password to. Next go into "Control Panel" and select "User Accounts," here you can select any of the user accounts and change or remove their passwords or delete their accounts entirely, along with other things.

Then you can put that drive back in as an auxillary drive again and have full access to anything you want to do on it.

The only other way I could think of possibly doing something about those protected files, and I'm not sure how well it would work with user password protected files, would be to boot up into the "Command Prompt" mode and using DOS commands track down and manually delete the files and directories that are protected when running under Windows. It's a little tricky navigating Windows directories using DOS commands, but I've done it before and deleted files that Windows wouldn't let me delete.

Any questions on this stuff you can try to e-mail me and I'll try to help more.

Best of luck.

Answer 2

If you can left click on the files and get a menu click properties and unselect all the attributes that have been checked click apply and answer yes.

Normally when you do this include all the subdirectories and files. In most cases this will allow you to delete files unless they are being used by another user.

Answer 3

If you have a fast Internet connection you could use a free backup service you can find lots on google some with up to 5GB free if you need more just sign up multiple accounts.

Answer 4

put your pointer on the file name right mouse click a menu pops up then select delete

Answer 5

Use
East-Tec Eraser
www.east-tec.com/consumer/eraser/