Can I safely delete the folder $Windows.~WS ?

I took the free upgrade from Win 8 to Win 10 some time ago. I suspect the process left a hidden folder called $Windows.~WS on my C: drive and it contains about 6 GB of data.

Does this folder do anything useful? Is it OK to delete it now?
 
If you're going to remove that folder, I would suggest using the built-in Disk Cleanup utility. Be aware though that removing the folder will prevent you using the rollback feature to go back to Win8, although if it's over 30 days ago then that's not an option anyway.

Shane
 
I'm always impressed by just how much "stuff" you know Shane.

I tried the Disk Cleanup Utility but it actually doesn't remove that folder. According to some discussion on tenforums.com, Microsoft haven't updated the utility to do that yet. However all agree it's OK to delete the folder.

Based on discussions at Microsoft Community forums, I restarted my PC is Safe Mode, then at the Command Prompt (Admin) I entered these 3 lines in sequence;

takeown /F C:\$Windows.~WS\* /R /A
icacls C:\$Windows.~WS\*.* /T /grant administrators:F
rmdir /S /Q C:\$Windows.~WS

Whatever that gobbledegook means, it was effective at deleting the folder.


~ Deane
 
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That's one method of doing it - for reference the first two lines change the permissions and ownership on the folder so it can be removed and the third line does the actual removal.

Shane
 
That's one method of doing it - for reference the first two lines change the permissions and ownership on the folder so it can be removed and the third line does the actual removal.

Shane

Yup... And I ran these from an admin command prompt without changing to safe mode.

I suggest copying the commands as is and saving them to a .cmd file (batch) for the future as Microsoft will do other OS updates this way going forward. There has already been an update at the end of November to Build 1511 with more to come.

John
 
You could try, but it probably won't let you as it is a protected system file. That's what the 'takeown' command line stuff rectifies, so that you can in fact have permission to blast it away.
 
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