Windows 10: I need to delete some WinSXS folder entries

I need to delete some WinSXS folder entries, no questions asked. How do I do that?


Taking ownership and rights isn't enough it seems. The last won't work on all folders inside WinSXS. I keep getting errors when applying rights for my username over these folders. "An error occurred.... access denied".

I do not need system stability. I just need to remove some folders is all.

:)

 

Inflight file

before deleting anything in the Winsxs folder read this.

WinSxS Folder in Windows 10/8/7 explained

and leave them alone

 

Deleting "Windows.old" Files (To Free Storage)

The folders listed inside the "Windows.old" folder are "WINDOWS" and then "System32" and "WinSxS". If I try deleting one of these folders, or any individual components inside the folders, the computer will still say I need permission to do this.

 

Hi there
Some of these are system files and symbolic links - not sure why you'd want to delete these. You will probably break the system deleting a load of these.

Download a program like TREESIZE to check if you've got a load of files in say your user directory you can get rid of or check all windows.old type files from any previous windows installation - these can be deleted. Check also temporary internet files etc.

If you really can't get any more space back get a larger HDD -- they are incredibly cheap these days - even for capacities of up to 5 TB.

Cheers
jimbo.

 

+1 +1

 

The large size of the Winsxs folder is more apparent than real. The NTFS file system has long had a feature that allows a single copy of a file or folder to appear in multiple folders. Starting with Vista Windows has used that feature quite a bit, the Winsxs folder being a prime example. Deleting one of these files only deletes the link to where the file is stored. Only when all references to the file have been deleted is the file itself deleted. Deleting files in Winsxs may in fact save you very little real disk space.

There are many potential dangers in modifying the winsxs folder. Unless you really understand what you are doing this is likely to break something. And you may not notice that anything is wrong until weeks later. As jimbo45 has mentioned you should probably be looking elsewhere to save disk space.

 

If you run this command, it will decrease size of WinSxS.

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

It cleanups and removes all the old superseded stuff from every component in the component store.

 

HI. The size of the WinSxs dir wasn't my issue. I just needed to delete some entries in the hopes Win10 would not reinstall some updates again after a pc-reset to factory defaults. But I think I broke the system anyways before I could delete the entries. I changed the ownership and rights of the recovery partition (Recovery/WindowsRE/*Wim) and after that a pc reset failed twice. Now my tablet wont even boot. Haha. Annoying Windows. My next question is how I can change back the ownerhip and rights of Recovery to trustedintaller I believe, through DOS?
Just for experiment, i want to get rid of win10 alltogether after this.