Cannot delete file flash9.ocx

Hi all,

This is a weird one. I have a desktop with two hard drives. Originally, I had drive X as the bootable Windows XP Home OS drive C: and drive Y as the secondary drive D:. I wanted to switch the drives so that drive Y would be the bootable OS drive and drive X would be the secondary drive. I didn't want to lose any of the information on either disk, so this is how I did it:

- I booted to DOS and renamed all the directories on the root of the OS boot drive X (C to OLDXXXX (e.g., WINDOWS to OLDWIN).
- I switched the cables around so that drive Y would be the master and drive X would be the slave
- I booted to the Windows XP Home CD and installed the OS on the drive Y (the new C.

This worked great. I now had a fresh install of Windows XP Home on my drive Y (C, and I had all my old programs, documents, and OS files on drive X (D in renamed directories. I could now reinstall all my programs and pull config settings that I needed from the old directories.

So, now that I have plundered the old renamed directoires on drive X (D, I want to delete them. However, I am unable to delete the old Windows directory (now called OLDWIN) because of one stupid file: D:\OLDWIN\system32\Macromed\Flash\Flash9.ocx. When I try to delete it I get the message:

"Cannot delete Flash9: Access is denied. Make sure that the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use."

I assume that some program has the file open. This doesn't make any sense to me. How can an application possibly have this file open when I completely reinstalled the operating system on a different drive and even renamed the directory the file is in?

I have even tried deleting it from safe mode, but I can't there either. The only thing I can think of is trying to delete after booting to dos again, which means I will temporarily have to switch the drives back again, since I can't access he secondary drive with my lame NTFS boot cd.

Is there any way I can determine why I cannot delete this file? Also, is there any program I can get that will tell me which files are currently open by which programs at a given point in time?

Any help here would be appreciated!

Yarko

 

Dont know if this will work for you but, drag that file to your desktop, restart, after restart right click and delete, has worked for me in the past. ed

 

Download this program. It allowes you to set a file to be deleted on startup. It has always worked for me when I have had a problem like this

MoveOnBoot
http://www.softwarepatch.com/software/moveonboot.html

 

I too had a similar problem ... old Windows installaion on another partition.
I have a copy of "Puppy Linux", which is great for this kind of stuff. It's a free D/L, not too big (94mb), and it boots and runs entirely from the CD - or memory stick if you want - without too much fuss. Then you can delete files on the hard drive at will.
I know my way around Windows pretty well but was never sure just why Linux might be useful. Puppy has helped me out a few times when friend's computers wouldn't boot to Windows, and allowed me to save files and make changes. I found it easy to use AFTER I realised that to see the files on a drive or partition you have to "mount" it - look for the Mount icon on the Puppy desktop.
You can get it here - http://www.puppylinux.org/home
Give it a try.

 

Hi Mink You might wish to check out the more recent threads as people will still be seeking any helpful advice you can give. This one is over 1 year old