how to reclaim spaces from the old system disk

Question

I just added another SSD disk to my computer and cloned the existing Windows 7 system over. Now I want to use the old disk as a storage disk with the newly added system disk.

On the old disk, I also have some data. So I don't want to format it to get all the spaces. I just want to delete the old OS folders. I start a console as Administrator and use "rd" and "rmdir" to remove these folders but I got lots of "Access is denied" result. There are still about 18GB stay there.

Two questions:

Q1. Is there a way to delete these old OS folders?

And also there is a System Reserved partition on the old disk.

Q2. Is it safe to delete that partition and merge it to the Primary Partition of that disk? I don't want to my data on that disk lost.

Answer 1

Depending on your tech knowledge and hardware:

Simple solution: Copy the data you want off the old disk and onto, say a portable usb hard disk (dirt cheap these days), then you can format the old disk and move the data back on it.

Equally simple, but requiring linux knowledge: Create an ubuntu boot disk on a USB stick (google "yumi boot"), boot into ubuntu from the stick, mount your old hard drive partition, and you can delete what you like with rm. This solution requires a bit of tech know-how.

You can use gparted to add/delete/resize partitions on any disk (worth doing before you move your data back on if you are going for option 1 above). So if you have backed up your wanted data, you can then remove ALL partitions and then add one big partition before moving your backed up data back on.

Pingers.

Answer 2

Q1 : Best way would be to boot from external media and delete then as proposed by Pingers. 'Access denied; is most likely because of file privileges and not because files are in use. You can still use a 'file unlock' tool like 'Unlocker' / 'Lock Hunter' etc. to check if those files are 'locked' by process and try to delete them that way.

In your case :

• Right click on the folder, choose Properties, go back to the Security tab and click the Advanced button. In the Advanced Security Settings window select the user you want to allow from the Permission entries list and make sure 'Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission entries from this object' is checked. Edit permissions adding your user, Allow, Full Control. Now try to delete.

Q2 : Depends on how you 'cloned' the old installation, this 100mb partition contains boot manager and BCD data, also BitLocker needed files etc. It is possible to delete it, but first ! unplug the HDD and boot, if windows boots proper from SSD then you can go and delete the partition, do it just to be sure.