Deleting Win 10 System Folders

Hi everyone, happy new year!

I accidentally booted my PC a month ago with the boot disk in the wrong physical location. Windows seems to have created a Recovery Folder on one of my drives that is causing a problem. The folder is hidden but doesn't even show up when you select to show Hidden Folders. The only reason I know it's there is because some applications are displaying it as there. File Manager does not. I am assuming it is also marked as a System Folder. The folder is empty. Now the issue is that it causes some applications problems so it would be nice to delete it. Since it was only created in error and doesn't seem to be used, I guess this is OK. I could format the drive but that's a bit drastic. It would be nice to just delete the folder, but Windows resists! It simply states that the delete is denied. I also have limited access to the rights and so on because File Manager won't even display it. Does anyone know a way to delete it? Perhaps a nice easy application!! ?

I'm not sure what problem that folder could be causing but I also had a system folder called Recovery at the root of my C drive and I was able to delete it like any other folder, though it did state that I needed administrative rights in order to do so, but when I clicked yes again it deleted normally.

I have one too and it is a system folder which is why you can't see it with just "Show Hidden Files" - you need to untick "Hide system files" too.

It probably isn't empty either - normally you'll get an empty C:\Recovery\Logs directory too (I did anyway).

If you really want to delete it (I just did and recovery still works but if yours contains WinRE.wim you probably don't want to), like any object you aren't authorized to you need to take ownership, give yourself authority to delete and then finally delete it.

From Elevated Command Prompt enter the following (changing C:\ to whatever drive)

takeown /f "C:\Recovery" /r
icacls "C:\Recovery" /grant "%USERDOMAIN%\%USERNAME%":(F) /t
rmdir /s /q "C:\Recovery"

Like this :

In my case, the default owner of the system folder Recovery (which I checked beforehand) was the Administrators group object. Since I'm using an administrator account I didn't need to take ownership of the folder to delete it.

Ah thanks. It's gone.
The problem was caused by some backup software that ( for reasons unknown ) did see that one system hidden folder. Whether it was the problem of the app or what doesn't really matter because it was causing a problem. I have deleted the folder now so everything is back to normal.

bro67 said:

Why? You will break the OS. Leave it alone.

Haven't experienced any side effects but I re-created the folder just in case, set its attribute to +r +h +s and changed its owner to Administrators just like the original...

Try using TreeSize Free in admin mode but be sure not to break your PC.