Deleting Un-Delete-able Files
 

Have you tried deleting a file and your computer responds with a Cannot Delete File error? This error usually appears when you want to delete a certain file on your computer. It can be anything from a document, a music file, a picture or even an email. It can appear more times than we want it to. For those who are just learning to use the computer, getting an error announcement may be a scary experience for them because they might panic and wonder if they have done something wrong in the computer and they don’t know what to do about it.

This error message usually appears for several reasons. It may indicate that there is no free disk space available to be able to delete the file. It may also appear to say that there is someone other than you who is using the same file or another program using the file and that any other applications should be closed first before being able to delete that certain file. And most of the time, it just appears to annoy you and make you either panic or get frustrated. To be able to delete that pesky file to free up that much needed disk space, here are the steps to go through.

1. Locate the file that you are trying to delete and its exact name, with its full location indicated. It refers to the long name starting with the disk drive, down to the name of the file. For example, the name of the file is funpictures.jpg and it is found in you’re My Documents folder which may be C:\username\Documents and Settings\My Documents. Take note of these names for future use.

2. Proceed to Start, Turn Off Computer, and choose Restart. Or, easier to just push the restart button on your computer, if there is one.

3. When the computer starts to boot up, push the F8 key on top of your keyboard continuously until the Advanced Boot Options Menu appears.

4. Choose the option Safe Mode with Command Prompt and log in to your Administrator account.

5. In the command prompt box, type in cd, which stands for change directory, and then beside it, the location of the file which you noted earlier, in quotation marks. Using the previous example you would be entering cd “C:\username\Documents and Settings\My Documents”. Then this location will come up on the command prompt.

6. On the next line, type the delete command, del, plus the file name of the document you want to delete, which in this case is funpictures.jpg. So, you have to enter del funpictures.jpg. Notice the lack of quotation marks on the words.

After doing all of this, that pesky file should be deleted forever. You can check by going back to the My Documents folder, but you can be sure that it will not be there anymore and will never be there to bother you again. If ever you stumble into one of those files that you want deleted and that error appears again, you know now what to do to get rid of that file.