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"Access Denied" When You Delete Folders from a Mounted Drive

Article ID: 243514 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q243514

SYMPTOMS

When you try to delete folders that are stored on a mounted drive and to send them to the Recycle Bin, you may receive the following error message:

Cannot delete Foldername: Access is denied. The source file may be in use.

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CAUSE

This behavior occurs because the Recycle Bin does not understand mounted volumes. For example, assume that the following drive layout is in use:

C: -- 1-gigabyte (GB) drive using the NTFS file system
C:\Host-dir -- The mount point for a separate 9-GB drive

When you try to delete a folder with the path C:\Host-dir\Mydir, Windows Explorer interprets the folder as being on drive C and tries unsuccessfully to place it in the Recycle Bin on drive C.

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WORKAROUND

To work around this issue, use either of the following methods:

When you delete the files or folders by using Windows Explorer, use the SHIFT+DELETE key combination. This bypasses the Recycle Bin.
Open a command prompt window and then use the rd /s /q command to delete the files or folders.

Note Both of these methods permanently delete the data. You cannot recover the data unless you have a current backup.

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