Delete old recycle bin items

I installed Windows 7 on my PC. I did a fresh install, but besides the system disk, I have a few other hard drives installed, as well as some external USB hard drives.

By revealing the system files (on the windows explorer settings), I'm able to see the folder that is used to manage the recycle bin items on each partition ($RECYCLE.BIN). So far so good, but the problem is that within that folder there are two sub-folders with files.

One of those sub-folders is related to the W7 recycle bin and the other folder (who's content was acessible only after changing its permissions) has a considerable size (about 7GB of stuff that was deleted within the previous installed operating system - Vista).

If I try to access the content of that sub-folder that belonged to Vista, I'm redirected to the actual recycle bin. Nonetheless, if I try to access it on the command line, I can see the original files (with their filenames changed to shorter ones).

My question is: what is the easiest and most secure way to delete the old recycle bin content? Emptying the recycle bin doesn't work, because W7 ignores the old content (that is stored on the older sub-folder). I come up with one of two procedures: delete those files on the command line or delete the old sub-folder on Windows Explorer.

Any suggestions?

nfh said:

I installed Windows 7 on my PC. I did a fresh install, but besides the system disk, I have a few other hard drives installed, as well as some external USB hard drives.

By revealing the system files (on the windows explorer settings), I'm able to see the folder that is used to manage the recycle bin items on each partition ($RECYCLE.BIN). So far so good, but the problem is that within that folder there are two sub-folders with files.

One of those sub-folders is related to the W7 recycle bin and the other folder (who's content was acessible only after changing its permissions) has a considerable size (about 7GB of stuff that was deleted within the previous installed operating system - Vista).

If I try to access the content of that sub-folder that belonged to Vista, I'm redirected to the actual recycle bin. Nonetheless, if I try to access it on the command line, I can see the original files (with their filenames changed to shorter ones).

My question is: what is the easiest and most secure way to delete the old recycle bin content? Emptying the recycle bin doesn't work, because W7 ignores the old content (that is stored on the older sub-folder). I come up with one of two procedures: delete those files on the command line or delete the old sub-folder on Windows Explorer.

Any suggestions?

If you are absolutely certain there's nothing in there you're going to want just trash the entire recycle bin using SHIFT+DEL... Windows will re-create it when needed.

But you should also right click your current recycle bin and set the bin sizes down a bit, 7gigs is a lot of garbage!

There were a couple of MSDN ISO's on it, that's why I had that much data on the recycle bin.

Thank you very much for the help!