way to delete files no matter what Windows says?

[Faceman]

Hi,

I got some troubles with my windows installation but can't take it down until I have backed up my movies.
Sometimes Windows takes hold of a file and refuses to let me move or delete it because "it is used by another person or progran" even if everything except for the explorer is shut down. I'm talking about normal media files (.avi, .mpg, .mp3) here.
normally I just ignore it and leave the file but recently a decompression went awry and left me with a 6GB (SIX GIGABYTE) unusable copy of JamesBond - Thunderball (should originally have been about 900MB), which I now CANNOT delete.

Does anybody know a program that will wipe files off your harddisk with no mercy no matter what windows says?

[andrewas]

The wonders of windows.

But this is odd. Normaly, the only things windows locks for its own use permanently are system files and such. If nothing but explorer is running and a movie file is locked, somethings wrong. Might be an idea to run a virus scanner and spybotSD on your system.

Problem with a locked file is that windows will prevent you doing anything until the lock is released. No way around it as long as windows is running. If its a 9x windows (95,98 or 2k( you can simply boot to DOS and delete it manualy. If its a NT windows (NT,2K or XP) your in trouble. Although if you have a FAT partition you can use a win98 boot disk to get into dos, most of these versions of windows have NTFS partitions which are hard to write to without windows. (Reading is easy, there are programs to do it for free, but writing takes money.

Try going into task managers process display. This is only available on a NT windows. It will show things that hide from the application display, but theres a lot of stuff in there that should be running. You wont do any permanent damge by shutting down the wrong thing, despite what windows says, so kill things that sound suspcious and see if you can access the file then.

[Zero Alpha]

Does anybody know a program that will wipe files off your harddisk with no mercy no matter what windows says?

Yup its called DOS

seriously! if you have an old copy of win98 you can boot from it and choose 'boot with CD rom support'. then you just need to naviage to the file and delete it

useful commands:

'cd\' go up a directory

'cd directory' change to subdirectory 'directory'

'N:\' change to drive N

'del file.txt' delete 'file.txt' in current directory

'dir/p' show contentce of current directory


these should get you goin. i hope this helps

[ 06-19-2003, 02:21 PM: Message edited by: Zero Alpha ]

[Artekpro]

^^^^^ DOS IS THE BEST ^^^^^

Dos is the easiest way, just follow the directions above