Forum Discussion
Spurious folder cannot be deleted on Windows 11: error 0x80004005
I have solved the problem in an unorthodox way — and a laborious one, which shouldn't have been necessary: I turned BitLocker off for the drive with the "immortal" folder (that is, I decrypted the drive), then rebooted from a Linux thumb drive, and easily and successfully deleted the folder from there. Then I rebooted back to Windows and restored BitLocker for that drive — which, of course, included generating, saving, and backing up a new recovery key, and deleting the old one at all locations.
The whole process took me over half an hour — too long for what should have been a trivial task of just deleting a folder. Unfortunately, the grandparent folder is important, I back it up regularly, and I wouldn't be able to do so with the spurious subfolder still within it — or at least not without a troublesome reconfiguration. My backup wouldn't be reliable, and other strange errors could occur. This is why I couldn't just let it be there and forget it.
Of course, I will never know what caused this strange behavior and how exactly Windows was reacting to that folder. More importantly, I don't know where the bug was: in 7-Zip, in Windows, or in both. Later I'm going to notify the 7-Zip developers about what happened as well.
I have solved the problem in an unorthodox way — and a laborious one, which shouldn't have been necessary: I turned BitLocker off for the drive with the "immortal" folder (that is, I decrypted the drive), then rebooted from a Linux thumb drive, and easily and successfully deleted the folder from there. Then I rebooted back to Windows and restored BitLocker for that drive — which, of course, included generating, saving, and backing up a new recovery key, and deleting the old one at all locations.
The whole process took me over half an hour — too long for what should have been a trivial task of just deleting a folder. Unfortunately, the grandparent folder is important, I back it up regularly, and I wouldn't be able to do so with the spurious subfolder still within it — or at least not without a troublesome reconfiguration. My backup wouldn't be reliable, and other strange errors could occur. This is why I couldn't just let it be there and forget it.
Of course, I will never know what caused this strange behavior and how exactly Windows was reacting to that folder. More importantly, I don't know where the bug was: in 7-Zip, in Windows, or in both. Later I'm going to notify the 7-Zip developers about what happened as well.