You can use Takeown.exe first to take ownership of all files recursively. and then use the command to Bart mentioned to do deletion. See the below thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprosecurity/thread/bb9e4b7c-43cd-410c-a612-23b0a096f207/#6266105e-16b8-4ba8-aa56-778dbf19a1d3 Hope this helps.-CrDev Blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/satyem

I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate onto my new SSD, and now I wish to clear up space on my old hard drive by deleting all Windows OS related files. I've changed ownership to myself, and tried deleting it, however, I recieve the message "You need permission to perform this action. You require permission from Gaming/Kendrick to make changes to this folder" whenever I try to delete a folder. I can go into the folder and delete each one of its containing files individually by selecting each file and changing the permissions from each one, but that would take hours to do for all the files in Windows. I AM clicking the "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects" check when I change ownership, but that doesn't seem to be working. Any help is appreciated.

Hi, 1. Are you going to re-use the old HDD as a Data storage? 2. Do you need data to be recovered from it? - if the old HDD contains system files only, and data no need to be recover, then the easiest way is to format the old HDD to make it clean drive. BartBartosz Kurowski Senior Desktop Support, Microsoft Cerified Trainer. MCP, MCT, MCTS, MCITP, MOS

The old HDD has nearly 1.5 TB of data that I need to keep. If it wasn't for that, I would have just formatted and made my life easier, but sadly that's out of the question.

Open Command Prompt windows CMD and use RD command. The command will remove selected directory, ex. RD /q /s c:\windows BartBartosz Kurowski Senior Desktop Support, Microsoft Cerified Trainer. MCP, MCT, MCTS, MCITP, MOS

Thank you, but when I do that I receive a whole bunch of access is denied messages when it tries to delete the files...

You can use Takeown.exe first to take ownership of all files recursively. and then use the command to Bart mentioned to do deletion. See the below thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprosecurity/thread/bb9e4b7c-43cd-410c-a612-23b0a096f207/#6266105e-16b8-4ba8-aa56-778dbf19a1d3 Hope this helps.-CrDev Blogs: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/satyem