Unable to Delete Icons and Folders from Desktop (Windows 8)

[Chris DuCharme]

Good Afternoon,

This morning I upgraded to windows 8 and chose the option to only keep personel files. The upgrade went smoth except for a couple glitches I have found.

First is I have about 7 files / folders on my desktop that are broken. When I attempt to delete them it says "Could Not Find This Item: This item is no longer located at C:\Users\... Please verify it's location and try again".

I then Have a try again option, skip or cancel. Try again results in the same message, skip and cencel just exit out of the error and leave the item on the desk top.

Anyone have any suggestion how to delete them?

The files include the compadibility report for upgrading to windows 8 and a folder containing the instalation files for open office. All of which are also broken when you try to open them.

Thanks=)

[skilithead]

Check and see if they are in the windows.old folder .

[Chris DuCharme]

Just checked. They are not=\

[skilithead]

Check in your documents , if not there then looks like there lost . Did you do a back-up before upgrading ?

[Chris DuCharme]

Oh, I don't need these files and folders. I just want them gone. They are on the desktop of my new windows 8 install and are broken.

The issue is I can't removed these broken files and folders from my desktop. It wont let me delete them because they can not be located.

[skilithead]

Try a reboot and see what happens .

[Azies]

You know what I did when this happened? I created the filed path, took a .txt file from notepad, and renamed it to the target file, including the extension, let's say for instance it can't find doink.exe, then go into Notepad, create a file called Doink.exe and put it where it's complaining, complete file path and everything, then delete the shortcut, and delete the dummy file. Not an ideal solution by far, but it might work.

[nekrosoft13]

also try scandisk (error checking under tools) it could be left over entries in file indexes.

[Chris DuCharme]

That's a great idea, I'll have to give that a shot!

[giantpotato]

Sounds like you might not have full permissions on the files. Take ownership on them and set permissions to "Full Control".

[Guth]

Sounds like you might not have full permissions on the files. Take ownership on them and set permissions to "Full Control".

Dont think this is the issue, the error is "File cannot be found".

Ive had this before, and I also created files in notepad, named them what I wanted to delete, then selected both my new file and the one I wanted to delete, and deleted them both.

Hope this works.

Guessing you have tried rebooting and right clicking desktop and clicking refresh?

Also, you could try navigating to desktop from its full path C:/Users/name/desktop and see if they are there? Try deleting from there.

[NightScreams]

I had that same issue in W7, it was similar to a deleted file but somehow the OS still was seeing the addressed file but no responding to it because its technically formatted. I just did a full format but you could try downloading a Linux live CD, boot with it and look at the Windows drive contents and if its shown there, try deleting it.

[Arkose]

You could try moving the Desktop folder location. Go to your user folder (%USERPROFILE%), open the properties of Desktop, and then on the Location tab change the location to somewhere else (choosing "Yes" when asked to move its current contents). Windows will move the files to the new physical location which in theory will make it sort out whether they exist or not.

You can move the Desktop folder back again afterwards, of course.