protected files - how to delete..

Bare Foot Kid said:

Did you try what I suggested?

If his primary disk is booting Windows 7 fine now, chances are there aren't any boot files on the secondary drive that needs to be cleared, so a format would be safe. Disk Management would tell the OP that, however, just to be sure. The OP is doing the ol' "mountain out of a molehill" concept on this one, instead of just making it the simple process that it should be.

I had this happen on an XP system drive that I was trying to copy files onto a new W7 system by installing the drive internal.
I finally connected it via a USB adapter and was able to access all the files/folders.

W7 just doesn't want to access anybody else's files. But via USB it doesn't recognize them as someone else's. Strange, wonder what we will have to do when they figure this one out?

Only my C drive is marked as a boot and system partition (system, boot, page file, active, crash dump, primary partition)
i have two more drives:
x: page file, primary partition, active
y: page file, primary partition

the only difference between the drive with the old win7 files and the pure data drive is the "active", I'm not sure why my y: drive is marked not active and x is, but I'm sure that is not the problem (btw, should I make Y active as well? x is the drive with the problem)

Copy to files you want to 2nd disk. Then format drive , then copy files back to 1st drive. This is the only way I could do it

Copy to files you want to 2nd disk. Then format drive , then copy files back to 1st drive. This is the only way I could do it