Can't delete a few files...

I have some Word docs on my system that were pulled over from a client machine for backup while I reinstalled the OS.

Simply put, I can't delete them... get an error that they can't be found. These are not mapped locations...

Have pretty much tried everything... from Win, from command line in safe mode blah blah.... Can't touch them in any way. No open, rename, delete nada...!

Even tried some program that was supposed to handle these types of files and you tell it to delete on reboot... no go on that either.... files just happily sit there.

Any bright ideas?????????

You probably have to take "ownership" of the files. Search here and or at MS knowledgebase for instructions on how to do that.

Sorry Steve... not an ownership issue. Have tried that and everything I know of... and have searched (and know how to do so) far and wide!

Thus I had to ask the question...

Find yourself an older (free) copy of NTFSdos and see if you can delete it with that. There are a few companies that make different versions of it but there are still a few freebies kicking around.

Try the following:

1. Open a CMD
2. Ctrl+alt+delete and shut down explorer.exe
3. In the command line, delete the file (hope it works)
4. re-start explorer.exe

No go for either of those options... nice tries though! Appreciate the effort...

See is anything in this article helps:

You cannot delete a file or folder

Were you able to at least access it with NTFSdos? Did you try changing the file attributes? or renaming or even moving it?

ntfsdos said it couldn't find any valid partitions... or I was running it incorrectly which could happen!

Here's the error I get when I try to delete it... or similar message depending upon the manipulation attempted.
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/abhoth/cannotfind.jpg

Try running error checking and defrag on the drive.

These are the files below... notice the odd naming structure...

con. math.doc
con. read.doc
con. s.s.doc
con. writting.doc

All I can figure is that these puppies were manipulated in some manner while on this other persons machine. Virus problem or who knows what..... no virus present at this time.

No errors on drive scan, defragging now simply to eliminate that from the equation.

Try this:

START | RUN | CMD
CD drive:\pathtothefiles
then use DIR /X /A which will give you the short file names.
then DEL every file one by one using it's short file name.

If it's not working try to delete the whole folder.
Make sure there are no files left in the folder you want to keep.
RD drive:\pathtothefiles

Been there, done that.... "cannot find specified file"

All defragged and still no go... Really more of an annoyance than anything else. It's not like they are taking up space .... not enough to count anyway.

Just an annoying little thing that drives me......

The RD command tells me the dir is not empty.... is there a switch to force it?

We want to see a screen shot of these files in Explorer!?!?!?!?!?!

Like so...???

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/abhoth/explorer.jpg

and for good measure...

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/abhoth/command.jpg