Can't get rid of a folder and its data

rob444

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Joined
Mar 6, 2023
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5
As title says.

The folder is placed on my secondary hard drive and it comes from an old PC of mine. The problem is that the folder was owned by my other PC's local account.
I fixed that by adding myself as owner and I still can't remove the folder.
I've even downloaded a regedit file that adds a menu to the context menu which "brutally" takes over any folder on a hard drive if permissions are bad.
This doesn't do the trick either!

My only option right now is to format the entire disk but I really don't want to do that. It contains a looot of old data that I wish to keep and I don't have any backup drive to move that stuff.

I wouldn't care about this folder but it's related to Microsoft Store and I can't install new games etc. from game pass into that folder, so I'm stuck installing them on my system drive which doesn't have that much space available...
Folder is D:\WindowsApps

Any ideas? Tips? Any commands I should try? I really just want to shoot this folder into the sun right now...


Thanks in advance!


EDIT: Tried asking on the Windows forum on microsoft.com. They are worthless there and only want to try to score so they get points and feel special (had to get that out of my chest). They barely read what you write and then they come up with an idea that I explicitly wrote that I've already tried.
 
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Taking ownership only gives you the ability to assign permissions in a DACL model (what Windows uses) you also need to assign permissions after taking ownership.

The other issue you may run into is if something has open file handles you won't be able to delete.

takeown /A /R /F C:\path\
icacls C:\path\ /T /grant Administrators:F

You can use a tool like procexp to check for open handles and close them before deleting
 
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takeown
SUCCESS on many things, a lot of "Access is denied" as well on sub-folders and files.

icacls
D:\WindowsApps\39C668CD.Madness-BaseGame_6.2111.82.0_x64__r7bfsmp40f67j\appxmanifest.xml: Access is denied.
Successfully processed 16 files; Failed processing 1 files

ussnorway said:
any thing related to Microsoft Store belongs to them not you
Click to expand...

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this? Surely I should be able to take control of folders? Windows Store won't allow me to download games to this folder because Windows Store does not have the permissions.
 
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when you buy something from the Microsoft store a note is placed on the system that basically says; account X, purchased software Y with credit Z

you don't have permission to;
  • take control
  • move
  • look at
  • change i.e put anything in or take anything out or
  • delete [this Is possible with hacking skill] but Microsoft will just put it back
if what you are bashing your head against is one of these files then forget it mate... format the drive or just learn to live with it being there
 
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It's the same, somewhat forced, online account linked between Windows 10 from old machine and Windows 11 new machine.
So you are basically saying this is not linked at all?
 
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Microsoft surely can't mean that you have to format a drive if you move drives between machines?
There has to be a way to neutralize this "flag"? I mean, this ain't Xbox, it's a PC.
 
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Have you ran a full check disk on D: ? (chkdsk D: /f /r /x)
Have you tried deleting the folder in safe mode?
 
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Solution
Josephur said:
Have you ran a full check disk on D: ? (chkdsk D: /f /r /x)
Have you tried deleting the folder in safe mode?
Click to expand...
Checkdisk takes over 6 hours in Stage 3 so I cancelled that. I might leave it over night but I doubt it'll solve the problem here.
I'll give safe mode a try tomorrow.

The only solution I got for this problem when I can't format the drive, is to partition the remaining free space and assign a letter to that new "drive". That would trick Windows Store for sure.
 
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