Can $Windows.~WS Be Safely Deleted?

what about windows old? that is 27 GB, but does not show up in disk clean up

JoeShades said:

what about windows old? that is 27 GB, but does not show up in disk clean up

That's your old Windows installation. You can delete it if you never want to revert back or need anything from it.

Nus said:

Well, I've had no issues since deleting it. Done a number of reboots, changed account to local, etc.

It was created during the upgrade and just looked like it contained the Win 10 image.

to me it looks like $Windows.~WS , besides the win10Image, also contains personalized xml files; i will double check it, and post my last impression about true/false: pc-personalized $Windows.~WS.

Yea, running the clean up even as an admin has kept the $Windows.~WS folder.

$windows.~WS contains 2 images, one an ESD (installx86.esd or installx64.esd) in sources, and another is an install.wim in $windows.~WS\sources\windows\sources.

If you have used the Media Creation tool, after taking a compressed snapshot of your system in sources\Panther during the mini-setup phase, it next downloads an ESD, then decrypts it to a windows setup filesystem (sources\windows\) identical to the files and folders that are found on the resultant windows.iso.

It also starts to make a minimal $Windows.~BT, containing sources\Panther in case an upgrade is continued immediately.

One odd thing is that the Install.wim file on the iso for the DVD is not a normal WIM file, it fails to apply the image with DISM and cannot be extracted or examined in 7-zip. It may just be an ESD with an extension change to fool inquisitive folk for the moment.

Now what I don't know is if the $windows.~WS also is created during the upgrade process for GA, because I haven't done that yet.

The tool then can create a DVD or USB setup drive.

Taking up about 6GB, It should be deleted if you have the Iso or USB setup drive. Clean up has not been told about this file extension yet. It will come in some later update.

I think that the $windows.~WS folder is created when running Media creation tool.

I deleted it .. from the command prompt (using troubleshooting / .. command prompt before bootup) .. it worked well and I have not experienced any problems at all.

The @WindowsSupport Twitter page advised me not to remove it just yet.

Hello! That folder is a set up folder for Windows 10. We recommend not deleting it just yet.