Solved Delete the Windows.old folder

[Night Hawk]

That's "IF" you have... IF you don't then you have to go out and install something when that's not even necessary! Windows already has a Disk Cleanup tool included. Disk Cleanup - Open and Use - Windows 7 Forums

Option One in the 7 guide for this covers how to remove the Windows.old using an app of any type. Windows.old Folder - Delete - Windows 7 Forums

The quickest I've ever seen the entire folder removed however was simply booting into another OS installation where no Windows processes are running such as the built-in Windows administrator to get in the way. When first seeing this with Vista however and booted into the older version there the first method was simply digging into the sub folders and working your way out if not using that version's Disk Cleanup option.

 

[Vince53]

I'm using an unlocker program that gets over half the folders. I'm afraid that in Windows 8, Disk Clean-up will not remove the Windows.old folder.

 

[Night Hawk]

Go for the LockHunter unless you are dual booting with 7 and simply restart into 7 and dump it from there! Since 8 is a newer version you will always find a few things that simply won't go on and run at first glance. This can be from various reasons as well.

Try downloading another copy of same. Right click on the installer to run as admin and in compatibility mode for 7 or older. Take ownership over and manually remove some more sub folders of sub folders of even more sub folders out of the way. Or try something else!

Despite having added in a boot entry for 7 on the first drive and setting the second where the RP as the default I simply rebooted into 7 and said "Good Bye" to the Windows.old folder from there in one quick right click! Have a live Linux cd by chance? That's another non 8 involved option where nothing in 8 is loaded into memory to get in the way.

 

[Vince53]

Folks, I appreciate all the people who tried to help. I do not understand why I couldn't just delete the folder. Following some of your suggestions, I was able to delete large parts of it, and then it ruined my Windows 8 Preview OS. I re-installed (Am I the first one to re-install it?) and it runs fine.

 

[raj11650]

Go for the LockHunter unless you are dual booting with 7 and simply restart into 7 and dump it from there! Since 8 is a newer version you will always find a few things that simply won't go on and run at first glance. This can be from various reasons as well.

Try downloading another copy of same. Right click on the installer to run as admin and in compatibility mode for 7 or older. Take ownership over and manually remove some more sub folders of sub folders of even more sub folders out of the way. Or try something else!

Despite having added in a boot entry for 7 on the first drive and setting the second where the RP as the default I simply rebooted into 7 and said "Good Bye" to the Windows.old folder from there in one quick right click! Have a live Linux cd by chance? That's another non 8 involved option where nothing in 8 is loaded into memory to get in the way.

thanks for the suggestion, solved in another way this IDM is the culprit, while file rebuilding it skipped few bits,
i did a forcecheck with the torrent file released somewhere and found 42MB were skipped by IDM completed using torrent and Finally got the RP after 6 days.

 

[BobD]

I had a similar problem. I couldn't delete the Windows.old folder in Win 8 Pro x86 RTM. I used the Take Ownership registry mod to take ownership of everything and it all came down to one file that would not delete by any method. I had ownership Ok but I kept getting Access Denied see the owner but I was the owner. I also started up the Administrator logon, took ownership of the file and tried with that and still no joy. After reading this thread I tried Unlocker Portable for x32. It indicated that there was no lock on the file but it gave me a list of actions I could try. I selected Delete and it was gone. Thanks guys.

 

[Night Hawk]

Hello BobD Welcome to the EightForums!

Glad to see you still went for the reg mod since that can still be quite useful for other things at times. The first and fast method I initially tried out on Vista was to go to the lowest sub folders and uncheck and apply the read only boxes to deal with them first long before the TakeOwnership mod was found. Once the subs ot the subs of the other sub folders were gone you simply moved up until the main folder could be removed.

That was the old method used on a one OS system. Once the dual boot phase first with XP - Vista running into permissions problems and then onto Vista-7 dual boots the boot into the other OS made life easier! With the 7-8 dual boot a boot into the 7 side saw the entire Window.old removed in one shot once the right click option was used.

 

[BobD]

Night Hawk, I was somewhat more limited in what I could do. This machine is a laptop and sometime back (for security, lol) I changed the boot to only from HDD and then put a password on my BIOS. I forgot the PW and found out that ASUS wanted about AU$250 to fix it. So I have been working with no ability to boot a CD/DVD ever since. Since then I've had a total OS failure and I've migrated from Vista to 7 to 8. I'm not dual booting so back to 7 was not an option. Booting 8 back to Safe Mode didn't work, the machine hung and then powered off. I was going to leave the remnants of Windows.old as it was only using about 9MB but a bit of Googling got me here and a fix. It's doing alright for a machine that I had written off because the OS failed (wouldn't boot) and it was in the cupboard for 6 months till I worked out a solution to fix it without booting a CD/DVD.

 

[Night Hawk]

Even with the laptop you wouldn't need to even go into the bios setup to boot from the optical or other external drive like flash drive! Asus using the Award bios will see the F8 option on desktops at least while it may be F11 or F12 used there to bring up the boot device menu to select the drive or device to boot from. You press the assigned at post time without ever needing to go in and change the boot order.

As far as the Windows.old folder itself once all the subs are cleared out one blog writer suggested renaming it to "Windows.personal" as a place to safeguard your personal data like family photos other then tucked away in the user account subs there where you have to dig them out. 9mb on any drive these days isn't even noticable!

 

[BobD]

with the PW on BIOS and boot restricted to HDD, F8 select boot was not available. That made it very difficult.

 

[Night Hawk]

Not good! If you run a quick search however you can find several guides on how to reset the bios. Post #2 from the Asus VIP section of their support forums explains the 4 actual options you have however. ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Forum- laptop bios password reset

You already know one of them will cost for sure!

 

[BobD]

NightHawk, thanks for the info. Re the possible solutions:

1: ASUS support in Melbourne Australia were only offering to reset it in their workshop
2: I tried but no solution worked
3: not possible according to ASUS support
4: I never thought of that one, I will look into it. I am capable.

It has been like this for a couple of years now. I am managing OK. Even if I get a total OS failure and cant boot, I have full disk backups using Acronis True Image. I just put the HDD in an external case attached to another machine and restore the disk from a backup copy kept on one of the other machines or offsite. I don't have this yet for Win 8 as I am still building it but I could easily go back to Win 7 if I really had to. Acronis has just released their True Image 2013 which supports win 8 and I expect to have a backup solution operative within the week.

 

[jladwig]

The correct way to remove Windows.old folder

1. Open up Control Panel
2. Select "System and Security".
3. Under "Administrative Tools" Select "Free up disk space".
4. Disk Clean up will launch
5. Click on "OK" and let it scan.
6. When the scan is complete, Click on "Clean up system files" button
7. does a re-scan.
8. Select "Previous Windows Installation(s).
9. Click on "OK"

 

[Night Hawk]

NightHawk, thanks for the info. Re the possible solutions:

1: ASUS support in Melbourne Australia were only offering to reset it in their workshop
2: I tried but no solution worked
3: not possible according to ASUS support
4: I never thought of that one, I will look into it. I am capable.

It has been like this for a couple of years now. I am managing OK. Even if I get a total OS failure and cant boot, I have full disk backups using Acronis True Image. I just put the HDD in an external case attached to another machine and restore the disk from a backup copy kept on one of the other machines or offsite. I don't have this yet for Win 8 as I am still building it but I could easily go back to Win 7 if I really had to. Acronis has just released their True Image 2013 which supports win 8 and I expect to have a backup solution operative within the week.

jladwig is correct on the Disk Cleanup being another option as well. Good point there!

I was just looking at the 2012 Acronis T.I. here but still run the 2010 version reliably. If and when the time comes to go for a newer version that or the next to come would be considered for sure.

Here I use Acronis along with the Windows backup option since you can mount the image like a second C drive which allows you to edit. Plus the size on disk for any image is smaller when dealing with some good sized ones. I even set up a dual boot using an image made by Acrons to see that run with the actual host 7 install to see if that idea would work while testing how well the program dealt with 400+gb sized backups.

As far as the numbers #3 and #4 options seen there I would likely simply end up sending the board itself into Asus and let them swap out the bios with the bios version you want on the new chip put on by them. That would insure the best results having the manufacturer doing this for the $25US approximate price plus shipping.

I have a Gigabyte board here(first of two for present case) that was cooked by a faulty supply. I wanted to see if Gigabyte could fix or toss but found another identical board for the old case instead. That would be fixed and held onto as a spare unless simply going with a notch newer AM3+ to replace the AM3 model to run the latest 4.2ghz quad. But spent on a the second same board as well as built a new 7 Pro case.

The main problem as you found out with locking up the bios or even encrypting a drive to secure data can be a real problem when you forget something! With an encrption you can simply wipe the drive but lose everything on it! For a bios however you found out what that will now need.

 

[BobD]

Yeah, that tip by jladwig is good. I tried that but could see no option for deleting Windows.old but I didn't know to rescan only System files.

In Australia, the cost of getting ASUS to do the job was AU$200 + shipping. The whole price was heading north of $250. They were not replacing the BIOS, only replacing or rewriting the password chip which is separate from the bios chip. Rather than spend the money on a fix, I actually scrapped the machine and bought another. Months later I worked out a fix for it. Now it's my test machine for Win 8.

 

[Night Hawk]

If you had simply been able to swap boards out that would have been cheaper in the long run while having a spare case around is always a help at times! I now have a second 7 Pro mini tower with a carrying handle I work with remotely for things like patching a security system into the remote pc.

That simply came about when initially going to order a replacement board and supply for the old Vista build but grabbed the micro atx board as well as deals on the case, supply, and memory as well as the lower end video card. I could have easily slapped 8 on that before running 7 Pro but all OSs are looked over on the main case here due to having the extra drive space as well as VM options.

 

[R0bR]

I installed RTM fresh and ended up Windows.old of the RP install. I tried to remove it and it complained about Access Denied, I'm pretty sure I just opened an administrator command prompt and recursively deleted that directory although I can't say for sure. One thing I do know for sure, I got rid of it pretty easily.

 

[Night Hawk]

If you simply typed delete at the command prompt you may only seen the entire folder hidden not completely gone! Generally with any manual removal methods getting at the subs of the subs under the main are what is first removed whether at the command prompt or if you still booted from dos in some way empty contents before folder deletion was always the rule.

So how did the RTM go besides that? Does it feel any better then the problematic RP? I will likely dump the 90 day developer release on a VM and get at just one more RP install before calling 8 a quits unless I find some reason to run it as a second OS opposed to the Linux distro presently on the other drive.

 

[R0bR]

If you simply typed delete at the command prompt you may only seen the entire folder hidden not completely gone! Generally with any manual removal methods getting at the subs of the subs under the main are what is first removed whether at the command prompt or if you still booted from dos in some way empty contents before folder deletion was always the rule.

So how did the RTM go besides that? Does it feel any better then the problematic RP? I will likely dump the 90 day developer release on a VM and get at just one more RP install before calling 8 a quits unless I find some reason to run it as a second OS opposed to the Linux distro presently on the other drive.

Actually "delete" is not a command, I believe I just typed "rmdir /S" and it was gone. As for RTM I haven't had any issues with it but I never had issues with RP either. If you haven't found a reason to run 8 up to now you're not going to, your thoughts on 8 have been clear so your best bet is to stick to Linux.

 

[Night Hawk]

What was found to work here at least on Vista and 7 for seeing the Windows.old removed entirely in one effort was the option you add to the right click menu called TakeOwnership From the elevated command prompt(right click to run as admin) you would enter "takeown /F /C:Windows.old* /R /A" without the quotes followed by pressing the enter and then follow that with "calcs C:Windows.old*.* /T /grant administrators:F" without quotes again followed by another press on the enter button.

As for Linux that was primarily a temp install on the second drive there in order to try out the Linux flavor of VBox where a 7 VM went right on while the RP again stalled like it had done with VM Player 4.0.2. The CP was able to work on VM Player but hasn't been tried out on the Linux side pending that being replaced with the 90 day look at the 8 Enterprise developer release.

Once I get a better look at the RTM side of things I would only decide whether or to not to run 8 as a secondary OS and stand alone OS as well since 8 isn't as dual boot friendly as you saw with previous versions! The 7/ 8 CP dual boot only saw the 7 mbr overwritten whlie using EasyBCD for the 8 mbr while the boot of 7 from the PC Refresh tried out with the RP lead to both Windows ending in Super Freeze!

The 7 drive became loaded with errors and was in need of a clean install. Later when switching from Native ide to AHCI 7 adjusted automatically to the change while the RP became totally unusable! The Linux install went on a temp substitute when the second also saw a little repartitioning take place to use the bulk of the drive for 7 system images. A front end 110gb root and swap are present until a new NTFS primary replaces that.