Deleting an old Windows image

[lewisner]

So, on the same drive as I have Trainz I have an old Windows installation taking up 23GB of space. I cannot delete it because I require permission from the ironically named Trustedinstaller . I've watched 2 videos , paused at each step and did exactly what they said and it won't budge. I've tried disabling Windows Module Something or other, no luck. Any suggestions short of formatting the drive ? I will not rest until I beat this thing.

 

[johnwhelan]

It might sound a stupid question what is the computer manufacturer and your hardware? Is your 240 gb SSD your only hard drive?

Thanks John

 

[johnwhelan]

Basically if it's a Dell or some such then formatting might be the only way to get rid of it. If it's a laptop I might think in terms of buying an new NVME SSD a 2 TB one would give you more space for trainz. Win 7 back up in control panel and back up to an external drive. You'll need a recovery CD as well, I'd burn two.

I'd also first start by going in with a Microsoft account admin account, it lets you do a few more things.

Windows has a disk clean up tool.

1. In the search box on the taskbar, type disk cleanup, and select Disk Cleanup from the list of results.
2. Select the drive you want to clean up, and then select OK.
3. Under Files to delete, select the file types to get rid of. To get a description of the file type, select it.
4. Select OK.

That might work.

Cheerio John

 

[lewisner]

It might sound a stupid question what is the computer manufacturer and your hardware? Is your 240 gb SSD your only hard drive?

Thanks John

Self built with my specs in my signature. 3 drives , all Samsung M2 SSDs. As far as I know Disk Cleanup can't delete Windows installations but I will look at it. I downloaded Active Killdisk but it doesn't appear to be able to delete individual files.

 

[johnwhelan]

Self built with my specs in my signature. 3 drives , all Samsung M2 SSDs. As far as I know Disk Cleanup can't delete Windows installations but I will look at it. I downloaded Active Killdisk but it doesn't appear to be able to delete individual files.

I'd back up the drive, format it then restore it. I assume you know enough to do it safely.

John

 

[pdkoester]

Have you tried to run Disk Cleanup? Select to remove previous versions and the Windows update cleanup options can free up some space.

 

[HiBaller]

Whenever I find I have a directory (or a bunch of files) that won't budge, I resort to unshipping the drive from the computer and attaching it to a USB-SATA dongle plugged into another computer. Then, you can do pretty much what you want to any directory of the problem drive. If your drives are SSDs, then perhaps trying a "Ubuntu Live" boot DVD and do it from Linux. The Ubuntu Live installation is purely in MEMORY and will NOT do anything to your internal operating system.

Bill

 

[lewisner]

Whenever I find I have a directory (or a bunch of files) that won't budge, I resort to unshipping the drive from the computer and attaching it to a USB-SATA dongle plugged into another computer. Then, you can do pretty much what you want to any directory of the problem drive. If your drives are SSDs, then perhaps trying a "Ubuntu Live" boot DVD and do it from Linux. The Ubuntu Live installation is purely in MEMORY and will NOT do anything to your internal operating system.

Bill

Well I downloaded the free version of Treesize and I found out to my surprise that I had Steam Library containing Fallout 76 with a size of 120GB on BOTH D and E drives so I deleted it from E then moved it from D to E , plus I had a file called Hotfix which was about 30GB and it contained really ancient stuff from 2009 etc. I've deleted all videos or moved them to an external drive and all photos have been moved to E drive. As a result D drive is now only Trainz and has 248GB free space instead of just a few MB as it had before.

 

[JCitron]

Well I downloaded the free version of Treesize and I found out to my surprise that I had Steam Library containing Fallout 76 with a size of 120GB on BOTH D and E drives so I deleted it from E then moved it from D to E , plus I had a file called Hotfix which was about 30GB and it contained really ancient stuff from 2009 etc. I've deleted all videos or moved them to an external drive and all photos have been moved to E drive. As a result D drive is now only Trainz and has 248GB free space instead of just a few MB as it had before.

I'm glad you looked first. It would've been a shame if you had just blown away the partition.

I did the same with an ancient hard drive sitting on my shelf that I put to use as a swap disk where I moved a page file from the SSD C: drive. I found some old Trainz content on the drive that I thought I had lost years ago.