Undeletable File Deleted

Every morn­ing for the last two weeks I’ve been dis­tressed to find my pri­ma­ry Windows XP sys­tem blue screened when I walk into my home office. The prob­lem, I dis­cov­ered pret­ty quick­ly, was with Safety_Net, my home net­work’s large back­up drive.

Within the fold­er H: ImaginationBox – Primary Daily Sunday Documents and Settings Pariah Local Settings Temporary Internet Files Content.IE5 ONBR2CHP was one URL file with a zero byte size and an incred­i­bly long, use­less name that began with “click%20>%2>%6e…” Everyday, when the back up soft­ware tried to remove this orphaned file, it would crash the sys­tem to a BSOD (“Blue Screen Of Death,” for those non-power users).

No mat­ter what I tried, I could not delete this file. I ran virus check on it. I tried to man­u­al­ly delete it through a com­mand prompt. I tried sev­er­al dif­fer­ent file man­agers. I tried to rename it. I tried to move it. I tried offer­ing it mon­ey to go away. Nothing.

Today, after call­ing the dri­ve a loss and look­ing at prices on anoth­er exter­nal dri­ve, I stum­bled across the solu­tion online. And now Safety_Net is back up and, uh, back­ing up.

If you have a file on your Windows XP or 2000 com­put­er you can’t delete, try this method:

    Note: Simple direc­tions pro­vid­ed for non-power-users (e.g. how to launch Task Manager the sim­ple and long way).
  1. Locate the undeletable file, and remove all oth­er files in that fold­er (move them to some­where else or delete them). 
  2. Close all run­ning applications. 
  3. Open a Command Prompt win­dow by going to Start > Run, then typ­ing in CMD and hit­ting OK 
  4. Navigate to the fold­er where the prob­lem file exists (i.e. “cd c:myfiles”). If you don’t know how to nav­i­gate in Windows’s Command Prompt win­dow, you should prob­a­bly ask some­one for help with this procedure. 
  5. Leaving the Command Prompt win­dow open, open Task Manager by going to Start > Run, then typ­ing in TASKMGR and hit­ting OK 
  6. On the Processes tab find EXPLORER.EXE
  7. Highlight (click once on) EXPLORER.EXE and press the END PROCESS but­ton, con­firm­ing your choice despite the warning. 
  8. Leaving Task Manager open, switch back to the Command Prompt window. 
  9. Type, with­out the quotes: “DEL *.*”, this will delete every­thing in the directory/folder, includ­ing the undeletable file. 
  10. Type “EXIT” to close the Command Prompt window 
  11. Switch back to Task Manager and, on the File menu, choose New Task (Run).
  12. In the dia­log box type EXPLORER.EXE and hit OK.

Now your com­put­er is back to nor­mal and the undeletable file is deleted.

42 thoughts on “Undeletable File Deleted”

  1. chris

    nice info.… iahve a cou­ple of those pesky file types myself

  2. Bri

    Darn, the file is still there. Almost tempt­ed to refor­mat just to get rid of it.

  3. nic0

    Nice! I’ve been both­ered by one of these dodgy files for a cou­ple of weeks. It was­n’t real­ly any­thing oth­er than it was THERE that final­ly caused me to google myself a solu­tion. Your page was the first to be cho­sen. Thanks for the help!

  5. LoZZ

    I have tried your method on a (rather large) file that I can’t delete. I can move it around and rename it but I get ‘access denied’ when­ev­er I try to delete it. Any ideas?

  6. Heinz

    Thanks for the info. The damn file on my hard­drive is gone for good now. You ROCK!!!!

  7. Nico

    I had the same prob­lem once, with a very large file. The pro­ce­dure dis­cribed above is will work with a lit­tle detail: try typ­ing “del *.* /F” in the com­mand prompt. You don’t have to end the explor­er pro­ces, too.
    Hope it helps. greets, nico

  8. Oracle

    Hey guys, thanks Pariah for the trick. one lit­tle prob­lem… I have an undeletable file direct­ly in the C: dri­ve, but not in any fold­er. I can’t move it. It keeps say­ing that the file is in use by anoth­er per­son or pro­gram. I’ve tried every­thing. I had this same file 3 times on my machine, your trick worked twice, but this time, I can’t move all the con­tent of dri­ve C to some­where else, to delete the file… Any suggestion??????

  10. Anonymous

    Hey Dieguti, nice tip, but still did­n’t work out. I found a solu­tion, I guess this could help some oth­ers: Go to start, then “run”, type in CMD. Go to the dri­ve where your file is: cd c: , then type DIR/x. note the name of your file (for exam­ple filena~1.xxx), then type del filena~1.xxx. First you have to shut down all run­ning applications.
    TERRIBLE!!!!!! I Killed it!!!!!!

  11. Chris M

    Pariah, you are the great­est. I had a file on my com­put­er for months. It was­n’t doing any­thing, but it was always in use from anoth­er pro­gram! Nothing I tried worked,so I went on Google and this site was the first on the list. THANK YOU SO MUCH! BEGONE, PESKY FILES!

    /me takes out undeletable file Sword

  12. laffs

    I too have a fold­er with undeletable files in, its a left over of nor­tons proc­tect­ed bin, id been mer­ri­ly delet­ing it to get rid, but did­nt emp­ty the files at one stage i believe, i now can­not remove any more of the files, have tryed all the solu­tions and lots of files went but some are stay­ing and it’s com­plain­ing that it can­not find spe­cif­ic file or files.
    the offend­ing files are named 00000001. 00000017. 00000018. etc rein­stalling nor­ton just reas­signed the fold­er with stuff in, but it’s not there to delete…just about giv­ing up on this one, for­mat c: could be the one for me!!

  13. planck

    I got a file in the tem­po­rary inter­net fold­er content.ie5. The file names are not big but they are like asci 167 or some oth­er char set. Del*.* or rmdir did­n’t work.╜ ╔ ╪ Φ .≈ there is an exam­ple of one file­name. Any Help please. Feel free to email me at [exposed e‑mail address removed to pro­tect the own­er from spam. To con­tact the author, click on his name above. –Editor]

  14. ninja

    I tried to delete a file with com­mand prompt but was not get­ting the file name cor­rect. I then tried what one user’s tip—type “DIR/x” com­mand, and it gave me the cor­rect file name. What a relief!!! Cheers to the no named post!!!

  15. Abet

    Thanks man, I need­ed that. I down­loaded this movie file and took me three days just for it to be fin­ished after­wards it did­nt wan­na work and does­nt wan­na be delet­ed and this method of yours worked. God, thanks a lot man, I owe you one… Thanks

  16. Monroe

    Totally awe­some! I tried it Nico’s way and got the 275mb back that I lost to an evil undeletable .avi file. Glad it was­n’t in the root of one of my dri­ves, it was in a fold­er. And it sure is nice to say that it WAS in a fold­er too. Now that suck­er is gone. Good riddance!

  17. chad

    and if it’s a direc­to­ry that has sub­di­rec­to­ries that can’t be delet­ed, try using “rmdir /S bad_files”, where bad_files is replaced with the cor­rect name you got from the DIR/X com­mand above.

    these undelete­able direc­to­ries and files have been dri­ving me crazy until i found this thread!

    thanks!

  18. Adam

    Thanks so much for this, i had a file that was stuck right in my down­loads file that just did­n’t want to remove itself, i gave up count­ing the ammount of util­i­ties i dled to try and get rid of it. Thanks alot, i owe you one.

  19. Erik Brown

    Thanks for info! I had a file do this to me while I was back­ing up some data. The cd-writing pro­gram changed a file name so that it can prop­er­ly burn it. IT was a very long file name which was trun­cat­ed with the like so: “Site_E~.gif”. So the file “did not exist” because of this till Google and your blog­ger came in the picture. = )

    BTW, do NOT pay $9.95 for help on this ques­tion. Example: http://​tinyurl​.com/533wt

    LOL!

    War

  20. Anonymous

    So I’m a col­lege stu­dent and instead of study­ing last night for my quiz today I stayed up until 5 am try­ing to delete a file that is on my desk­top that won’t go away. Sounds crazy I know but when I’m try­ing to fig­ure some­thing out I don’t stop until the sun comes up or I fig­ure out the answer. 

    Well the sun came up.

    When I attempt to delete the file I get the reply “Cannot delete “file” : can­not find the spec­i­fied file”

    On June 1st anoth­er user had the same prob­lem but was able to fix theirs by going into cmd and delet­ing the file using its short name plus its file extension.

    Here’s the link to the mes­sage on expert-exchange:

    http://​www​.experts​-exchange​.com/ Operating_Systems/ WinXP/ Q_20632707.html#8623289
    I have also attempt­ed to take own­er­ship of the file but that did not work. I have tried to delete the file in cmd but I’ve done the prob­lem is, when I look up the file’s short name using dir/x the cor­rupt file short name is list­ed but it does­n’t have an exten­sion. That being the case I can’t type the short name cmd to delete it. 

    So I was hop­ing that with my 5 am sob sto­ry, some­one might actu­al­ly know how to fix this and be able to help me out.

    I’ve cre­at­ed a screen cap­ture that might allow you to visu­al­ize exact­ly what I am talk­ing about its locat­ed here:

    http://​lennon​.csufres​no​.edu/ ~jkc26/ screencapture.jpg
    Thanks for your time and knowl­edge, it’s very appreciated.

    [e‑mail address mod­i­fied to hin­der spam­ming – Ed.]Azz3879 (at) hot​mail​.com

  21. Anonymous

    Not work­ing here. I have a file on my desk­top called: “CAQ7MR6T.” The icon on my desk is trans­par­ent like it was a sys­tem file but its not. When i try to delete in win i get a msg telling me that the file dosent exists. Also its not wieable from dos so i cant delete that way

    Anybody know how to solve this??

  22. jon

    thanks so much chad.
    I had tried every­thing until I read about yours. You’re a life saver!

  25. Pariah Burke

    A vari­ety of things–file cor­rup­tion, the sys­tem assign­ing root lev­el per­mis­sions for a file oper­a­tion and nev­er releas­ing them, ille­gal char­ac­ters in the name, etc.

  29. Pariah Burke

    Excellent! I hope Nico’s advice helps some of those for which my method has­n’t worked.

    Its pret­ty cool that this one lit­tle post on my hum­ble blog has become a resource to peo­ple expe­ri­enc­ing prob­lems on their systems.

  30. Pariah Burke

    Laffs,

    I would strong­ly rec­om­mend you con­tact Symantec (Norton) Technical Support. If you do it via e‑mail/web form at http://​www​.syman​tec​.com, just send them exact­ly what you wrote above. They should be able to help you. I doubt you’ll be the first per­son they’ve heard from with that issue.

  32. Jojo Yee

    It does­n’t work after fol­low­ing your sug­gest­ed way.
    I just need to delete a pro­tect­ed fold­er, of which access is denied each time I click at it.
    How do I delete that fold­er? I tried to type ‘rd’ using run, no ways.…pls help.

  33. suleyman

    Thanks for the help i had files on my com­put­er that start­ed from $ sign and were un deleat­ed ‚now with Your help they r Gone.Thanks again for Your help.

  34. SpaceFuzz

    This solved my problem.
    Many thanks to you.

    Later
    Space

  35. jim

    thanx a zil­lions!! i tried every trick in the book to redeem myself of these pesky files, but your’s is the only way that hit home. You rock!!

  36. Eric

    I have a bad file that I can’t get rid of and I tried look­ing up the direc­to­ry name by going through CMD and then typ­ing dir/x but it did­n’t give me the direc­to­ry name that I need. The file is on my desk­top in a fold­er called Music and I moved every­thing else out of that fold­er so I can affecte­ly delete the file Music. By the way, I could­n’t even type oth­er direc­to­ry names because CMD said it was invalid. What do I do? HELP!

  37. Ryan

    Using the DIR/x sort­ed it :D
    i been upfor about 4 hours try­ing to do this, thanks to the anon tipoff i am sort­ed by finnal­ly learn­ing the file name :D:D:D:D
    i am sooooooooooo hap­py i can go to bed!
    :D:D:D

  38. Jamie

    ive jst down­loaded a pro­gram and one of them stu­pid files came with it!
    i could­nt move it, delecte it, rename it, see its prop­er­ties or any­thing to helpme get rid of it. i am a com­put­er whizz myself to be hon­est how­ev­er tis one did bafle me. I have been try­ing a sim­i­lar method four 3 hours and then final­ly i came across this method.
    This Work first time and now i can go to bed.
    Thanks for the help
    :P

  39. anonymous

    Hi,

    This helped me so much, those method using com­mand prompt oth­er peo­ple sug­gest­ed did­n’t help and I was look­ing for some­thing as sim­ple as delete the fold­er to fix it. Thanks :).

  40. Sarena

    I tried this and for some rea­son it’s not work­ing for me it tells me that the file is in use by anoth­er per­son. I fol­lowed you’re instruc­tions word for word but I am not get­ting any­where i still have about 5 or 6 files in there.

  41. Sarena

    I think I am going to try nico’s advice i guess i should have read on see­ing as how this may work

  42. Sarena

    :( i still did­n’t get no where. Thanks for the help though.

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