Resolved How to remove slaved Vista folders?

This is an oddball post. It might belong in the Vista section, because the problem involves a Vista folder. I'll proceed....

In a working XP system I've slaved a Vista hard drive.
The Vista system died because of motherboard failure.
The customer asked to go back to an XP system.
So I built him one.

I'm keeping the old 80gb (Vista) hard drive as a file source for the customer.
But many areas of that slaved old drive are just taking up space.
One of these is the WinSXS folder. There's no reason for its continued existence.

Problem: The folder defies deletion. Any suggestions about deleting this redundant repository? Is it just a matter of taking ownership? Or is there a simpler way?

Thanks

 

HI masonite, have a look at this link:http://www.abdevelopment.ca/blog/reduce-size-vistas-winsxs-folder
"Reduce the size of Vista's Win SxS Folder "
Hope this is what you want to do. Neil.

 

Thanks Neil, but there's nothing on that site that's relevant. Ever since Vista was developed (if that's the right term for such a disastrous operating system), many thousands of computer users have been trying to find out how reduce the size of their working Vista's WinSXS folder.

That's not what I'm trying to do. My working system is XP - Vista is just a dormant passenger in a slaved drive. What I want to do is delete Vista's WinXSX folder. This particular Vista will never run again and most of its folders are redundant. But they still resist deletion.

My question was: How to delete the WinSXS folder on a slaved drive. Anyone?

 

Simple answer - take the ownership of the whole slave drive when logged in as Administrator from XP. Now you can do whatever you like. Or boot from a Linux live cd & then do it.

 

Thanks for those excellent suggestions, rsinfo and Evan Omo.

rsinfo - I'd wondered about the Take Ownership thing: I have a how-to-do-it on the subject that I'd archived some time back. I was just reluctant to do the deed until I understood it a bit better. Hence my question here.

Evan Omo - I can't remember the error message. The reason I wanted to delete WinSXS was really as an experiment in control. I mean, the slaved drive holds the entire contents of the old Vista system. I've renamed the drive, but it used to be C, of course. And I renamed Vista Windows to Swindoze.

The customer has about 15G of crucial stuff on this drive and if possible I'd rather retain all of it, except WinSXS, which is now redundant and just wasting space. There probably more folders that are junk - Program Files and Program Data, for instance.

Ideally, what I'd like to do is dump WinSXS, then shovel everything else into a new folder called 'old', say. So if the customer ever wants to delve into his archives they'll still be there.

But, and this is a big BUT - I don't want Vista exerting any influence over the XP system from 'beyond the grave', if you get my drift. I've already experienced one problem with Office, which was on both systems. No BFD but I had to uninstall and reinstall Office on the XP system after I slaved the Vista drive.

So maybe I'll try making a copy of the customer's User folder on the slaved drive and copy it to the XP drive.
Then do the take-owner thing on the slaved drive, then see if I can dump WinSXS.

Cheers all

 

Thanks again, Evan Omo. Unfortunately the 'take ownership' method doesn't work - the WinSXS folder still resists deletion. In fact, I can't even delete individual files from the 11GB folder - I just keep getting the 'Access Denied' message.

So I repeated the 'take ownership' thing - this time just focusing on the WinSXS folder itself. The permission system seemed to be working - flying files and all that - but at the end nothing had changed.

Maybe it'll respond if I go into the PC via the Recovery Console and run a 'del' command on the WinSXS directory? Or boot with SysInternal's ERD Commander and try to delete it that way?

Meanwhile, I managed to copy the contents of the User folder to My Documents on the XP parent drive, but I'm guessing that all of those files will also resist deletion if the customer ever decides to dump them.

I seem to recall now that certain Vista files always remained independent of normal control methods, which is probably why the system was such a PIA.

If you have any other ideas I'd be grateful

 

Boot from a Linux live cd & then delete the files/folders that you don't require. Its the method that's most probably going to work.

 

Thanks rsinfo, I'll try that. Can you point me at the files\method I need? I've never put together a Linux boot disc.
Cheers

 

Download Ubuntu has all the instructions you require. Don't worry, its not rocket science.

 

rsinfo, thanks for the link. OK, I've downloaded the 695mb Ubuntu 11.10. So I'm gonna burn it to a disc then use it as a boot disc to manipulate Windows from 'DOS'. Is that right?

Also, where does WUBI come into it? I downloaded that as well.

 

Sorry for the delay in response.

Yes, you burn it to a disc & boot from it. It's not gonna be DOS - it would be Linux & in graphics mode. No typing of commands, unless you want to do it that way.

WUBI is the Windows Installer to help you run Ubuntu as a program in Windows environment. You don't need it.

 

Thanks for your help - much appreciated.

 

Never did get Ubuntu to work. No matter - I reformatted the drive and that fixed it.

 

Sorry to hear that you have to reformat.

Why didn't Ubuntu work ? Did not boot or something else ?

 

Guys, I have no idea what happened with my attempted use of Linux. It's getting back a coupla weeks now, so the details are hazy. Suffice to say that I tried all the things that 'seemed' to be the next step but nothing I did enabled me to control the slaved drive in such a way as to delete files. Sorry - that's not particularly informative but it's the best I can do.

As I said - in the finish it didn't cause too much disruption to just format the drive and start afresh.

Cheers