What happens if you delete System 32
in Windows 10, I'll delete it for you so you don't have to
Hello everyone I'm Leo Notenboom
for askleo.com. This question really takes me by surprise.
It is apparently a fairly popular question
in some circles, and it really does boil down to exactly what you would think. What
happens if you delete the Windows System32
folder and everything in it?
Well, we're going to do that now.
Before I do that, I have to tell you that I have completely
backed up the machine that I'm about to do this to.
Deleting system, 32,
as you might imagine, is going to have some serious repercussions.
And because of that, I want to be able to recover.
And the best way to recover is with a system image backup.
So I've got that in place.
Let's go over to Windows and delete System 32.
Now, there are two different ways to go about this.
I'm going to show you this one real quick.
You can use Power Shell to do this.
It is something that you want to do
in an administrative prompt when you're in powershell, by the way,
I actually find some of the commands in the old command prompt easier.
So I actually will switch over to command
since we're in an administrative power shell.
Simply running CMD gives you a administrative command shell.
I'm going to go up one directory and I'm going to RD /S system32.
Now this would delete a lot,
but because we're actually running windows, my concern is that it's not going
to delete enough such for whatever definition we want to be enough.
So what I'm going to do is something a little bit different.
But this is one approach that you could use to actually delete System 32.
Not everything would be deleted.
I may not be able to delete everything anyway, but the bottom line is that this
will delete a lot and it will have the I'll just call it the desired effect.
The approach that I'm going to use instead is to go into settings,
update and security recovery, advanced startup.
This is where we actually get some
additional options to run more limited versions of Windows that will allow us
to actually access more of what is on our hard disk we're going to troubleshoot.
And then click on Advanced Options,
what I want to run here is the command prompt.
The machine is rebooting into a command prompt only version of Windows.
Normally you will have only one account to choose from in this case.
This is the Ask Leo! Account, one of my example accounts,
and it's actually going to ask for the password to that account.
And there we are.
So this gets a little complicated,
because when you boot into the command, prompt your C drive isn't your C drive.
You can see that we're actually at our
current drive is actually an X drive, which is the command prompt or this system
that we've been booted into, but not the system on our hard disk.
Unfortunately, our C drive is also hasn't
been given the letter C, it was probably have been given something else.
The thing to do is to run diskpart,
which is the disk partition tool built
into the Windows command line and say list volume.
This will show us all the partitions that the disk partition tool knows about.
Now you can see here that the C drive is this small 580 megabyte drive.
That's not a real C drive.
What we end up looking for is the drive
that matches in size, which is my 98 gigabyte.
And we've booted into a setup where this is now our d drive.
So if I now exit the disk partition tool and go to D make that my current drive,
you'll see that that is in fact my normal C drive, the C drive that would
normally be active when we boot into windows.
Normally from here it's pretty easy.
We go over to windows and we run the command.
We expected to run in the administrative
shell, except this time we're running it without Windows itself actually running.
Are we sure? Sure.
So what's happening now is that the system
is deleting the contents of System32
and removing the folder.
So if we now do a directory, well, you'll see there are lots of files.
But one thing you'll note is that there is no System32 anymore.
So we've successfully deleted system32.
Now we can answer the question, what happens when you delete System32?
Well, it noticed something's wrong and it's trying to do an automatic repair.
It's having a little bit of a tough time.
Automatic repair couldn't repair the PC,
the PC is so broken without a system32 that it can't boot.
We'll look at advanced options real quick and that might allow us to do something
like reset the PC and potentially install a version of Windows from a backup copy.
You may be able to restore Windows
from a backup image that you might have taken system image recovery.
But the bottom line is that deleting System 32 renders your machine unbootable.
That's because System 32 is Windows.
In fact, it's probably about 80 to 90 percent of windows.
Even the Windows folder itself,
which has a lot of files in it, is, of course, Windows.
But System32 has the vast majority
of the files and programs that make up windows itself.
When you delete System32, you're deleting windows and that means Windows can't run.
So why are people asking this?
My understanding is that there's apparently a prank or a scam that's
actually encouraging people to do this, apparently just to cause trouble.
My advice don't do this.
It breaks windows.
You do not want to delete System 32.
Now, there is one very legitimate way
to delete System 32, and it is something that happens as a side
effect of installing another operating system.
If you were to install a new copy of Windows or if you were to install
a different operating system such as Linux, then by definition the System 32
that's on your machine will get overwritten by the new operating system.
But that's the only thing close
to a legitimate approach to deleting system 32.
Hope this was helpful,
maybe a little entertaining for the original article on which this
little experiment was based for links to related articles,
for comments and for any updates that I happen to come across.
Visit askleo.com/127295
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.