Windows 10: My C drive always gains 20gb of nothing sometimes, turns out System Volume Information...

thanks a lot!

:)

 

Volume in drive C is reserved by system

I'm trying to access the directory of my drive C through the cmd (with administration), but instead I get "Volume in drive C is reserved by system".

I can access drive D very easily.

Any suggestions how I may access it?

 

Remove System Volume information folder from external drive

I have currently found out that System Volume information folder on my external HDD takes around 124GB of space. Hence I decided to delete it to free up some additional space. But for now everything what I have tried did not succeeded.

IMPORTANT:

• External hard drive has 1TB capacity and was previously used for backups and creating restore images (not anymore).
  
• It's connected via USB 3.0 port.
  
• System protected files are displayed.
  
• All operations are performed on the clean install of Windows 10 Pro x64.
  
• Formatted in NTFS
  
• I only have one 1TB drive so moving files to another drive will not be an option.
  

So, what I have tried for now:

All the instructions provided here, meaning:

1. takeown /f "F:\System Volume information" /a /r /d y
   
2. icacls "F:\System Volume information" /t /c /grant administrators:F System:F everyone:F
   ("Are you sure?") y
   
3. rd /s /q "F:\System Volume information"
   

This only helped me to delete one of the folders with a bunch of .db files in System Volume information folder. And I get Access denied as previously.

What I also thought of is to create a separate partition on this drive and move all the files there then format the partition with System Volume information and merge partitions back. This did not work quite well as creating new partition also created a System Volume information folder. And it took quite a while to do the partitioning.

I have gone though following posts:

How to delete "System Volume Information" folder from external drives?

How to delete a folder from external drives if names are too long (like System Volume Information/content...)?

Any suggestions guys?

NOTICE: I don't want to use third party software like Unlocker, Eraser or anything similar to these two. There should be a legit way to get rid of the files in Windows without third party software.

 

System Volume Information

Actually, there's a 3rd file, but it's hidden. Its name is 'tracking.log'.