Annoying disc drive won't allow me to change ownership or permission.

Ever since I've had my computer there has been an extra drive on it. it was called microsoft (Protected). It has absolutely nothing on it, and it has no use. I have been trying to delete it to no avail, so I renamed it to annoying drive.

Whenever I try to access it it gives me an access denied message. It has no owner, or even permissions, and when I try to change it to me, or the admin, it gives me the same message. I went to the list of things on the computer, and I can't even find it.

I then attempted using lock hunter to find out what was blocking me from changing the file. Also to no avail. It says that there is nothing protecting it.

Any ideas? Thanks

If your machine came with Windows preloaded then I'd bet my bottom dollar that's where the OEM files are stored. Check under computer management (storage) to see what capacity this partition has.

15gb. It also says Healty (recovery partition). There's another partition that's only visible through disc management called system reserved; it has 100 mb

Hi, thanks for the info. Yup that sounds about right plus the 100mb partition is used by windows for some system files and system restore points. Now if you really wanted to remove the recovery partition (which again contains your copy of windows) you could either enter the storage snap-in again and right-click on the partition or obtain a new copy of windows and perform a 'custom' install. It's during this process that you could reformat the drive and remove said partition.

Sounds like one of Windows 7 Paranoia - just like many, including me, have had great trouble with accessing programs we have installed, since they went to Program Files, overly protected...

If you want to get a "free copy", you need to clear everything, and re-install. That's the only way to get out from pre-pre-pre-whatever Microsoft. BUT, be sure you have a fully licensed disk of Windows. Otherwise you may run into trouble.

Cheerio.

Alright cool, thank you. I was just wanting to try to make my computer more organized, but I suppose this is something important, so I'll keep it.