Windows XP to Windows 7 Low Disk Space
I recently installed Windows 7 on a laptop that previously ran Windows XP. I’ll admit, I was kind of flying through the install as it was one of several things I was working on at the time. When the laptop rebooted into Windows 7, I was happy… until I looked at the amount of free space on the drive. Apparently Windows 7 doesn’t use the whole disk by default if you don’t choose upgrade. Instead it uses the same disk, but moves all the files into a folder called Windows.old.
I thought, no problem, just delete the old folders and be done with it. One problem. Even as the administrator of the laptop I didn’t have ownership or permission to delete the files. After a few minutes of digging, Windows 7 came through again. So here’s a tip: to remove the files (Adobe files are especially tricky), follow these steps.
- Login as an administrator
- Run cmd
- Cd to the directory containing the files or folders
- Take ownership of the files by running: takeown /f filename or takeown /f directory /r/d y
- Change permissions: icacls filename /remove everyone:d removes special attributes
- Then: icacls filename /grant everyone:F full accesss for everyone
- Now run: attrib –r filename
- Finally: del filename
- (optional) Do a happy dance
While this may be intuitive to MS people, for a Linux guy like me, this nugget was very helpful. Hope this helps others in need.
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About the Author:
MIke Gargiullo - Senior Security Consultant