How to delete Win8.1 from non-boot hd?

[hr1975]

About 2 years ago I cloned Win8.1 from a 1tb hd to a 256gb ssd for my Dell laptop. The ssd was then made my C: boot drive and the hd became my F: data drive (there is also a D: Dell recovery partition on this hd). The ssd now has Win10, but the old, unused Win8.1 folders and programs from before I got the ssd are still on the hd. Now I am running out of space and if I could delete everything from F: except the Users folder (which contains all my data) I could free up about 110gb.

I logged on as admin and tried to delete some of the Win8.1 folders (Program Files, Windows, etc.), but it does not allow me to do this. Since this hd is not used to boot from I thought that I could just delete all the stuff I no longer need. I do not want to reformat or do anything drastic since I have about 855gb of data in Users. Is there a simple way to delete everything except Users from F:? Thank you!

 

[Colif]

why are you still using the user folders on the hdd if you cloned it to ssd?

you should be able to take ownership of the folders and delete them - http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-take-ownership-and-get-full-access-to-files-and-folders-in-windows-10/ I would suggest take ownership of entire drive but that might have bad effects or unforeseen ones anyway

Sounds like you really need a new drive as 110gb may not last that long.

 

[hr1975]

Thank you, Colif. I went to the link you provided, downloaded TakeOwnerShipEx, and installed it. I logged on as an admin user and then ran it on the Program Files folder. It reported I had ownership so I tried to delete it. It gave me an error though and said I needed to be an admin user. ???? I was logged on as an admin user. Strange.

 

[LowlySkeleton]

If all possible, it would probably be best to buy yourself another HDD to expand your already shrinking storage space. By doing so, you can also transfer all your files over to the newer drive and completely reformat the older drive, getting past all the hassles of using third-party programs to delete those system critical files from your old win8.1 files on the HDD.

Also, have you tried running the TakeOwnerShipEx as admin (you know, but right clicking and running as admin)?