Unacceptable. It's a 500GB drive with about 450GB of data. I don't have any other place to backup this data to. While it's entirely possible for me to recover the ghost images (there are other techs here with them, but they are in other states for other sites), it would take entirely too long to do so.
I do them almost daily. As for recreating, I do not want to recreate over 2 dozen different images.
EDIT: Furthermore, as these restore points get added on by the PCs I work on, reformatting will take care of the current ones, but what about in the future? I'm not going to sit here and reformat my hard drive every month or so just to get rid of them all.
Last edited by FuryoftheStars; 03 Apr 2012 at 09:54. Reason: Added more
Yuo need to go on every pc that drive is connected to and turn off system restore. Also, if you want to delete the system volume information folder, download an ubuntu 11.10 iso and burn it to a disc. Next, you will need to boot your system off of it. Don't click anything until you get to the screen where you can either try ubuntu or install ubuntu. Click try ubuntu. Once that loads up, the external hard drive icon should be on the desktop of Ubuntu. Double-click on it to bring up your external hard drive. You can now delete the system volume information folder.
I realize you're probably not a part of the Win 7 development team, so please understand while I sit here and say "Well that's ******* stupid", that I'm not directing it at you. :)
Thank you for your time, sir.
Funny I would find this relatively recent thread: I have the EXACT same scenario as the OP, an external hard drive I use for image backups, which owing to a power failure last night was ON this morning (it's usually powered off) when my AV scanner ran, and it alerted me to potential viruses in the ext. drive's System Vol Info area (Restore Point). I thought "heck this drive shouldn't even HAVE restore points" but sure enough there were several ancient ones on there, and no amount of TAKE OWNERSHIP and Delete was working for me, although honestly I never did try Safe Mode. I simply booted using Puppy Linux and got them cleaned right off, including one that was 7GB in size.
Windude99 thanks for the idea; I'd not have thought of that myself (heck I don't even remember why I made this Puppy Linux disc)!
Found the answer to removing all restore points while booted normally in Windows 7 is to log in as the real Administrator account. You know the one that is on every Windows machine, can't be deleted, and has full super user rights. I enabled the account, set a password and then switch users to it. Then go in the Systems control panel -> System Protection (you should get no UAC screen even if enabled) -> Highlight the drive with the offending system restore files -> Configure -> Delete.
It deleted the restore points made on a different system as I watched the directory (already taken ownership of the dir). It then reported usage was 0 bytes.
It may be possible to run this as a normal administrative user but I don't have another drive to test that theory.
Also it might be best to disable the real administrator account again as virus love that account.
Cheers
Lance Arden
My Tech Department Pty Ltd
The method Lance used worked for me too, even from a (single) user account with admin rights. Just go to control panel-system-system protection-select the problem drive, click configure, click delete, confirm, done!
If it doesn't work that way, turn system protection on, move the slider all the way left, confirm deletion of all restore points and turn system protection off again.
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