Trying to install the 1TB drive and it went very badly. I had to re-install WIN 10 on my original drive and now there are two files windows.old and windows.old.000.
Trying to remove these because the drive is showing RED in file explorer the Disk Cleanup will not remove the System Files.

I even tried to delete these using Administrator Permissions in DOS and it states they are removed but when I look back all are still there.

any help removing these old system files. I did copy the windows.old to an external drive so I do have q backup.
It will take some time to rebuild all the apps and desktop that I lost. Luckily all is available on One Drive.
Thanks,
Dan K

ps I still may be in the market for a new PC since this is still a 7 yo machine.
D.

Did you select remove previous windows in the options in disk clean up? I'm trying to think how you ended up where you are and I got nothing how did you transfer to the new drive?

disk cleanup
select your drive
with the next dialog that comes up, 'Clean up system files' (box)
which once again asks you to select your drive
& it is with that second prompt that it then goes & looks for "service pack files", previous installs & whatnot
(or at least that's the way it is working on Win7)

No panic, since you have a backup.

ell after much worry, I finally got "most" of my files back. Even though I had done a MS Backup to an external drive, when it came to do the restore I could not find this function. Luckily the One Drive external file system had almost all my files. I am still in the process of rebuilding the file system.

As to removing the old windows installations, if the disk is showing Red in explorer, there is insufficient space to do this function. After I moved some files and did some other cleanup, there was sufficient space to perform the Clean System Files.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Regards,
wings515