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I'm running Windows 2003. I am an admin on this particular machine. I tried to delete a folder, but something went slightly wrong. When I navigate to its parent I can see it in there.

When I double click the folder, I get the error message: D:\Path\to\folder is not accessible. Access is denied.

When I try to delete the folder, I get Cannot delete foldername: Access is denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use. and I get the same when I try to rename it or create a similarly-names folder.

There is ample room left on that drive, so the disk isn't full at all.

Is there anything else I haven't thought of? I don't really want to restart the machine, but I will if I have to.

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Access denied means access denied. It's there and you are not allowed to delete it. No problem. – mailq Aug 17 '11 at 16:27
I have seen some weird behavior when you have filesystem corruption. You may want to run a check disk, but if that is on your system drive, you would need to reboot to do that. – Zoredache Aug 17 '11 at 16:35
@maliq Actually, there are a lot of possible errors that get crammed into the Win32 "Access Denied" error. See for example support.microsoft.com/kb/113996 There are 25 references to "ACCESS_DENIED". This could easily be STATUS_CANNOT_DELETE which doesn't say the say what the issue is. – Chris Smith Aug 17 '11 at 17:36
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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 17 '11 at 17:05

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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

You may need to take ownership of the folder and its contents then reset the security before you can delete it.

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I can't take ownership (or at least I don't know how). The only tab available in Properties is General – Piers Karsenbarg Aug 18 '11 at 8:34
You might have to login with the actual administrator user, not just a user with admin rights. – ErnieTheGeek Aug 18 '11 at 13:11
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up vote 4 down vote

Use process explorer http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx to find out what has the file in use - there is some process that has a lock on it and explorer does not tell you which one.

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