No option to elevate privledges?

Remnants of a previous install of W7 are on my "E:" drive, on a separate physical drive than my new installation. I want to blow away the old OS files - but I am not allowed to, not even simple stuff like "\Program Files|", as I am told I do not have the permissions and there is no option to elevate.

How do I fix this idiocy? Am I going to have to boot to another system and then blow them to circumvent W7 "protecting" me???

I love the options, but when the options become restrictions without a way to circumvent, it's just a huge annoyance.

Can you Disk Management > Format the drive? Use install DVD to format the drive?

I want to destroy items very specifically on the drive, as it has a lot of data I am still trying to recover from my getting too ticked off at all the changes in W7 and making a fairly huge mistake... I can't understand why I can not target any specific obsolete folder, such as described, and not elevate myself over Windows chosing to protect me now from myself - that would have been nice before I did the destruction, and it wasn't with any of these folders. I find my data a lot more valuable than the darned OS...

try right clicking on the folders in question, and clicking on the security tab. Then click edit, select your username, and make sure you have full control enabled in the checkboxes underneath. Then OK out back to the folder and try again.