I've been trying to resolve this for months. If anyone can help me it would be much apreciated. I can't format my hard drive. I have two in my pc. What hapened was, durring an active download of a Windows update I decided to move a folder and accidentaly droped it into the Windows update folder as it was downloading. I had no problem oppening the folder that I moved, but it's subfolders, no banana. It said access denied. I moved the main folder back to it's original position with no problems, but the subfolders "access denied" still. To this day no matter what I tried I could not oppen those files and recover my files. I no longer need or want those files so I just want to clean up my hard drive and recover the space. (that folder is taking up about 20 gig's) But now I can't format it. I'm getting "access denied" again. I'm the administrator, I've gone trough folder options, inside and out, and have not found a way to fix it. I'm in Windows XP. HELP ME PLEASE!
low level format it, caution as it will completely erase your drive. the benefit of not using xp, in my opinion, was not giving up all control of dos to xp. i can still fdisk, format, at will!!! he he sorry most of the drive manufacturers, including the ones that get bought by others have a site where you can download plenty of usefull utilities for low level operations. what was the manuf of your drive?
You can format a Drive a number of ways, however it maybe that you just wish to delete the files. XP for some reason locks files and the only way to delete them is to boot in to a DOS type mode. There is a program called NTFS for DOS, which boots the PC and supports NTFS so you can navigate to the file and delete it using standard DOS Commands. If you can't find a copy of NTFS for Dos on the web - reply to this post as I am sure I have one somewhere Formating the Drive can be done: Load the XP OS Disk from start up (i.e. boot from the disk) and the delete the partition, then format the partition/drive job done. Use a Utility such as Partition Magic