Vista's is hard ways, I'll tell you. I am a developer working with Ultimate, VS2005, SqlServer, VFP9, etc although still my knowledgebase is not sufficient to deal with some of the problems. Day before Christmas I tried to "refresh" XP on one of my secondary partitions and as a result lost Vista references in the Bios and at the start menu there was no Vista for me to log in. I had to reinstall Vista again, actually this is the third time. Before it was for a different reason, also MS related.

I will address this problem which is still nagging in a separate post but now is this. I want to clean up one of my External HDD and reformat it as NTFS since I cannot do any system backup on FAT. I got a folder there with this name: 2801e0d4d586efe20e that I cannot delete no matter what I try.

I have now no recollection where this darn folder came from, I mean I copied it from some system months or years ago. It could even be Win2K or a WinServer2003. I get access denied all the time.

I right click on the folder, Properties==>Security Tab==> am able to add myself as a user. Give myself full rights, I am the Administrator, I am a part of the Administrators Group. I can even remove both users (groups), do Advanced. I changed the owner, now it is me, gave full rights. Nothing helps.

This folder is full of MS hotfixes. I do not understand why I "saved" it.

I need to get rid of it.

Please, help.

Uncheck box to inherit from parent, use winfile.exe from NT4, run cacls (or whatever it's called in vista) to see the permissions on it

-gosh

Thank you. I am not at that computer now, will be there in an hour but it is my recollection that threre was a clear sign in that column <not inherited> and I still could not do it.

I think what you call calcs is gpresult.exe or/and gpupdate.exe in Windows\System32

This has become a major issue, hopefully we will be in touch I am not sure this issue is so esay to resolve. There are other facets to it too.

Hi, unless I misunderstood you, your advice does not work at all. There is no checkbox to uncheck anywhere. When I go all the way thru Properties and many daughter windows I see a window that says that it is not inherited. I mean that main folder. I checked some subfolders: the same story. There are somehotfixes, the same story there. None of htem have owners but I can assign myself, no problem. It does not move me a step further. The overall folder is "owned" by me but the system does not give a ****.

What I've discovered is kind of scary.

I went thru my registry keying for "J:" which is the letter for my external HDD. I am about to replace it with 500Gb MyBook WD, I want to format it before I do. So I went thru the registry and discoveredd that Vista apparently has been using this HDD as a storage for temporary files while installing APIs I download from MS, like silverlight, etc. Some of the events are relatively new.

It appears those temporary files were stored in a separate J:\Temp\ folder which is either not there (deleted by Vista after each download) or I deleted it yesterday without giving it even a it short shrift.

So far I could not discover any references to the folder I am trying to delete but I am wondering if this could be something of similar nature.

Any ideas as to what I should do?

I just use a bootable OS emergency disk and format from there or better yet, a bootable HDD utility/maintenance CD that comes with any hard disk package. In most cases it doesn't matter if the utility/maintenance software is from a different manufacturer than the HDD. Give it a try.

Yep, this is what I am trying to set up right now. Bought WD MyBook x 2 for my systems. They have sales. It is for the future though. The problem I am facing is different. This HDD does not appear to be usable for my purposes unless I reformat it.

Yep, Just finished installing WD Mybook on one of my systems, opened up the user manual and whoops, it is formatted to FAT32. Catch-22 all over again as Yogi Berra would say.