Please help me delete these files

A few months ago I got a new laptop (HP, Windows 7 64-bit). It has a much bigger hard drive than my old laptop, so I moved a bunch of files I was keeping on an external HD on the laptop's c: drive. Including some mp3 files.

I noticed the problem when I tried to load these mp3s into my mp3 player (MediaMonkey). There were tons of listings in my library that were garbage notation, full of semicolons and numbers and system characters. These files wouldn't play, and if you tried to perform any action on them they'd essentially crash the program. If you waited a loooooong time, sometimes it would manage to ignore your action and just play the next playlist song, or whatever. After a lot of investigating, it turns out some of the files that came over from my external HD are somehow corrupted: while the physical filename is fine, the metadata (title, artist, album) is now full of all the garbage-y information.

I'm guessing now that the problem is at some point I converted my external HD from Fat32 to NTFS; I'm half-guessing that that led to the metadata corruption.

Here's the thing: I cannot delete these files or modify their metadata, either through MediaMonkey or file properties. I've tried everything I know:
- Right-click delete
- Delete key
- Drag to recycle bin
- From cmd prompt "del song.mp3"
- Starting in safe mode and deleting

Most of these actions just cause the system to hang, resulting in Explorer eventually restarting. From Safe Mode, I can begin the deletion process, but it hangs forever on the "Preparing to Recycle" and "Calculating" state.

Can anyone help me clean up these files? Thanks!

And I also tried creating a file in a separate directory with the same filename, then copying and pasting into the same directory as the corrupt file, hoping it would straight up overwrite it. Didn't work, explorer hangs. Maybe it was a stupid idea.

have you tried using software like unlocker? they usually delete anything you want.

Try deleting from the command prompt.

File - Delete from Command Prompt

Folder - Delete from Command Prompt

You can also try lockhunter.

LockHunter is a free 64/32 bit tool to delete files blocked by any processes

BTNH108464 said:

have you tried using software like unlocker? they usually delete anything you want.

Hi, thanks for the response, sorry for the delayed reply. I did try this, but no luck. My understanding is to use it you right-click on the offending file and Send to --> Unlocker. But once I right-click on the file it freezes up Explorer, CPU Usage goes to 100%, and I can't do anything in Explorer (open or close windows, start programs) until I close it through Task Manager and restart.

The other thing is, no Program is using this file. It's metadata is simply so full of garbage that Explorer can't seem to deal with it. It's driving me nuts; I've never seen anything like it, since it's not running, nothing else is running it, it simply can't be accessed in any way.

Bill2 said:

Try deleting from the command prompt.

File - Delete from Command Prompt

Folder - Delete from Command Prompt

You can also try lockhunter.

LockHunter is a free 64/32 bit tool to delete files blocked by any processes

I've tried deleting from a command prompt, but it just hangs and hangs with the blinking cursor. I've literally waited overnight, and in the morning it's still "working" on it.

This works most of the times.

BTNH108464 said:

have you tried using software like unlocker? they usually delete anything you want.