The file that won't die

[Greg12]

I have Star Wars episode 1 but i can't delete or access it.

it says anouther program or user is using it



But their's nothing running. except windows

[WildParadise]

run the windows boot disk and delete it in dos

[Greg12]

XP doesn't have DOS

[Tommy]

xp doesn't need dos. If you can grab a boot disk from an earlier version of windows use it to boot to dos and delete your file. However you might want to run Nortons or something like it to see if there is a problem with your drive.

[kinneera]

That's great if he has XP installed on a FAT32 partition, but if its NTFS he'll need to boot the rescue console off of the XP install disc.

[Greg12]

yeah i have NTFS. that's one of the reason's i got XP was cause i needed to make files bigger than 4 gigs.

[Chemcat]

I've had this same problem more than once, always a media file, either mp3 or mpg and the only way I could delete the file was to open up a command prompt: Start>Run> type in Cmd>Enter...then open up task manager and go to the processes tab and close explorer.exe. In the command window navigate to the directory that the file is in and type at the prompt: del <file name> This has worked for me as it seems that explorer.exe is the app not releasing the file. You'll have to use task manager to reboot as you won't have the start button or taskbar after you close explorer.exe

[sean madison]

ok, restart ur pc and let it boot into windows.

We know that star wars is a movie and can only be used by another program usually if its a media player or some sort of video editing program.

ctrl+alt+del and search for ANY media player or video editing prog. When u find one, end task immediately.

[wellmashed]

Also if you are running Kazaa (or clone) make sure that the file is not the one selected by Kazaa's internal player coz this will stop access to it as well even if it's not being played by it.

[eyeofbeholder]

Given that you're running XP and NTFS, your problem lies in insufficient security level access to the file. Log in as administrator, the open the security tab to the file and add yourself as the owner. You should then be able to remove the file.

[homerpez]

Um... allow me to toss a suggestion in here...

Are you trying to delete from Explorer?

Humor me here... select the file, without opening it (so it's highlighted). Wait at least 10 minutes.

See, what many of the latest versions of windows do (since 2000 and ME) is preview files whenever it can. On a video file, it often waits to read the ENTIRE FILE to see if it's a type it can make a preview image for.

For pictures, this is obviously easy. For large, compressed videos... that's another story...

Did a "preview" image come up at the left-hand side of the screen? If so, now try deleting it... let me know what happens...

[Greg12]

I got it with a Dos Prompt

I cleaned out the folder then i did "del *.*" and it got it

that was after a reset and i had never clicked on it

[homerpez]

Glad to hear the problem's solved...

Hope you didn't shy away from my solution... the "10 minutes" thing was an embellishment a bit, more like 30 seconds you should wait at most for the preview...

Didn't mean to scare you off... but for anyone else with this problem, try this out (easier than DOS).