Moving and deleting a reluctant file...

Hi malware fighters,

Whenever DEL and Shift-DEL fail, one is left more or less empty-handed;

Reluctant file : Admin 1 – 0.

Which tools are left to help us with removing the file at hand?

A file that could have been the cause a hard disk was full

or prevented a servicepack to install?

Files can get locked by certain processes,

so a file cannot be moved or deleted by another process,

even if that process is run by an admin.

It is a pity that in many cases it is unknown what process keeps what file hostage

and even when we know that,

we haven’t got a guarantee it can be either moved or deleted.

Posponed action

When you want to move or delete these files,

there are some Sysinternals-tools that can aid in that process.

MoveFile can run a postponed action at system restart

like moving or deleting.

Well we need to restart - that is true.

But while the action is performed directly upon restarting it will be executed,

and the chance of the file being locked before an admin can react is small.

MoveFile uses the MoveFileEx API for this purpose: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365239(VS.85).aspx

that comes in Windows by default and that puts an action in a row for Session Manager.

Commandline

PendMoves is the second program to use here.

With it open MoveFile-actions can be shown.

Both programs come together and belong together,

and therefore can be downloaded as one download via TechNet-website:

http://technet.microsoft.com/nl-nl/sysinternals/bb897556(en-us).aspx

MoveFile and PendMoves are both commandline-tools.

With movefile and a following filename together with the new location,

a file is being replaced.

Through Movefile with giving in twice a “” you leave the new location empty

to change the move into a delete.

Via PendMoves scheduled actions can be demanded,

pol

Two tools for the collection:

Don’t these kind of stuff put the hard drive index and table at risk? I afraid when it try to do some change during boot and when we have no access something wrong happen and ruin the data on disk and hard to recovery (fix the table).

when I cannot access my data on hard drive because of some thing like encrypted data by windows and locked files which are in core of windows (those which cannot be unlocked via my favorite program Unlocker which David posted too) I use Ubuntu Disc and use in Live Mode (in my own system it’s installed, I use it live on other computers). I feel this works better than those tools which works during reboot, at least I can see what’s happening and I can delete every files which I don’t like and rename files in windows core. the only problem is that Ubuntu copy files without attribute (e.g. Hidden, Read-Only, NTFS Compressed…).

FileASSASSIN:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/fileassassin.php