Regina Spektor stays put.
Regina Spektor stays put.
Regina Spektor - Remember Us To Life (CD 2016) is a folder that remains intact in Windows 10. Attempts to remove it have failed repeatedly. At every step—deletion, shifting, renaming, hiding, using command prompts, or specialized tools—it persists. The system consistently reports it cannot be located. Even when I moved files inside, duplicates appeared without the original content. After relocating everything else and trying to delete the parent folder, the issue persisted. It seems this folder is stubbornly protected.
Power on the Linux installation from a live USB and erase it. This process has worked many times before when Windows couldn't read certain paths, like those with colons. I guarantee it will succeed unless your filesystem is severely damaged, in which case I recommend backing up everything and reformatting, though I haven’t encountered such an issue before.
I experienced a similar issue with a file on my desktop. I removed it using the unlocker tool: https://www.iobit.com/en/iobit-unlocker.php
One of the characters is probably some weird one , like for example the minus character is not the negative sign but some unicode character like 0x2212 (math minus) − or 0x2500 (box drawing light horizontal) ─ or 0x0336 (combing long stroke overlay) ̶ or a few others that look very similar. You can probably rename it using the long path notation .. Open a command prompt and type there a command that looks like this : RMDIR /S /Q "\\?\c:\temp\folder" RMDIR is the command to delete a folder /S tells it to delete any folders inside the folder that you want to delete /Q tells it to stop asking if you're sure you want to delete the folder called Folder "\\?\" is a special character combination that tells Windows that the path may have weird unicode characters. C:\temp\ is the path to the folder you want to replace, of course you change this with your actual path, like D:\Music\ or whatever When it comes to typing "folder" or in your case " Regina Spektor - Remember Us To Life (CD 2016)" , don't type it manually, use the rename option in windows explorer to copy in clipboard the file name, then go in the command prompt and paste the folder name Don't forget the last " at the end, after you paste the album name
It seems I already had this set up before. The extra steps really helped. Thanks for the tip—Regina’s gone, so I’ll give it another shot if I run into another tough tenant.
It generally functions well most of the time. Occasionally, files can't be deleted since they're locked by other programs. However, you can quickly access Resource Monitor or Process Explorer from SysInternals Suite to identify which application is handling the file. Also, keep this in mind because it also resolves issues when applications generate nested folders and paths exceeding 250 characters. Windows Explorer and other file managers won't be able to modify or delete files if the path length surpasses that limit. You can bypass this by appending a question mark before the path, which allows entering up to about 32,000 bytes of characters (since some symbols require more than two bytes).