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I recently merged two drives that were in separate partitions on a hard drive with Partition Magic. Hard drive F would be copied into the a folder called F on hard drive E. Unfortunately, an error occurred and the operation failed. The two drives were merged together, but the contents of drive F: were lost.

This wasn’t the only problem. I tried to delete the F folder, but when I clicked on it, I would get the following message:

Folder is not accessible. Access is denied.

I couldn’t access this folder or delete it. I tried rebooting the computer and the folder could not be deleted. It wouldn’t even work when rebooting into safe mode. The Unlocker application couldn’t delete it either.

The reason why this folder could not be deleted is that my security ID didn’t match the security ID of the owner of the folder. Partition Magic made changes to the security ID when it was merging the drives and didn’t restore the permissions when it failed.

Changing the Security ID of a Folder

The following steps need to be done before you can delete folders with different security ID’s:

  1. Right click on the Start menu and select Explore to run Windows Explorer.
  2. Open the Tools menu and select Folder Options.
  3. Open the View tab and scroll down to the bottom in Advanced Settings and turn off Use simple file sharing.
  4. Right click on the folder that you want to delete and select Sharing and Security.
  5. Click the Security tab and press the Advanced button.
  6. Open the Owner tab and click Administrator in the Name list. If you are logged in as an administrator, click Administrators.
  7. Click the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects box so that it is on.
  8. Press the OK button.
  9. You’ll get an error message saying that you don’t have permission to read the contents of that folder. Press the Yes button.
  10. Click OK to apply the changes you made to the folder.
  11. Delete the folder.
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