Ah, yes the infamous
system32 virus that exists on all Windows PCs
Well, not really
Obviously, we've all heard the joke that system32 is a virus to delete it, but it's actually a critical windows directory
But what would happen if you did delete system32?
Obviously windows would no longer be able to boot
But would you be able to recover it somehow?
How much damage would it really do even while you're deleting it and still running Windows? What would happen?
Well, that's what we're gonna do in this video
we're gonna do a real-life demonstration of what happens if you were to delete
system32 on your computer and quickly before we do that just so you guys have some context
Why don't we go over what exactly system32 is and why it's important because there's a lot of Windows directories
So what's the big deal about this one? Like I mentioned before system 32 has a ton of critical files that are essential
Not only for Windows itself, but also third-party programs that are running on Windows
So this includes shared libraries like dynamic link libraries or DLLs
It has driver folders like for hardware and stuff that makes Hardware work and even some
built-in core Windows programs things like the task manager or notepad all
Exist in the system 32 folder and there's actually another similar folder in the windows directory called SysWow
64 and the while 64 stands for
Windows 32-bit on windows 64-bit and basically this actually holds a bunch of 32-bit
Libraries and stuff whereas the system 32 has the 64 bit libraries
So yes when system 32 has the 64 bit stuff and SysWOW64 has the 32 bit stuff
It doesn't really make sense
It's basically just for backwards compatibility from developers who didn't really plan ahead
But needless to say the stuff in the system 32 folder is used by just about everything so deleting
It would be pretty much catastrophic for the Windows installation. Now, normally you cannot delete the system 32 folder
It's protected by permissions. So even if you try to do it, it would say permission to
So it's basically impossible to do this
Accidentally and even if you are trying to unless you knew how to get around these things you wouldn't have any
Worries about deleting system32 by mistake, but in this case, we really do want to delete system32
So what I'm gonna do is kind of mess around with the permissions and give myself access so I can actually delete it now
I'm not going to show how to go through and do all that because it's a little bit complicated
And I don't want you guys knowing how to go and prank your friends by ruining their computer
But needless to say we'll kind of jump right into it and I am doing this on a virtual machine
So I'm not going to destroy a regular computer installation
so at this point we're now inside windows and I do
Actually have the permissions to delete pretty much all the files and there are still some weird safeguards in place
For example, I might not be able to delete everything that's in use and seeing as it's a system directory
There's quite a few of things in use but there's still plenty of stuff. That's critical that I can delete
So we're pretty much gonna have some fun here
Delete everything I can if I try to delete everything in bulk. It kind of blocks me and just doesn't delete anything
So I'm gonna try and delete large segments at once and then you can see if I delete
Folders and dll's I get the occasional error message
But a lot of times it will let me do it and they do get added to the recycle bin and if you check in
There you can see quite a bit of things are getting deleted
So really I'm pretty much just highlighting as much as I can in a large swath and deleting it
It seems to let me delete most of the dll's and stuff
But the folders it won't let me delete anything in it because if there's one thing in there
It's kind of weird probably a lot of extra permissions and safeguards are in this folder specifically
But it seems like I'm still able to delete a pretty good chunk and I guarantee this is gonna break things
So right now I've already deleted a ton of stuff and the system is already acting pretty weird
So you can see I can't really use to start many if I try to click on things. It doesn't do anything
I
Open up menus and it's just blank or it
crashes stuff really isn't loading random error messages all over the place and even when I try to go reboot by clicking the Start menu,
The power button nothing appears. So even without rebooting the system is already basically broken
You can't watch launch the task manager. Everything's destroy at this point, but Windows is at least still running
So what I'm gonna do is manually reboot the virtual machine and see what happens afterwards
So I'll just reboot it now and we can wait for it to load and you can pretty much see it
Instantly tries to go into automatic repair
it knows right away that something's wrong and the windows failed to boot and it says diagnosing your computer and
It did so much damage. Look right now it says automatic repair could not repair your PC
so we probably at this point would have to do a
Complete new reinstall of windows to get this computer working again if it was a real computer, though
We can click through to Advanced Options and just kind of see what's there so we can click on
Reset this PC and see what happens remove everything and even and yep, even that didn't work
It says there was a problem resetting your PC
So probably a lot of the recovery stuff is gone and we can even click through some of the other options in this troubleshooting Windows
Environment and nothing really here is going to solve it. So really this Windows installation is destroyed
The computer itself obviously is not you could still reinstall windows on it
But it's really going to be a pain so clearly through that demonstration. We can see that it was no surprise
What happens when you delete system32 the Windows installation is ruined until you completely
Reinstall windows and you really can't do anything with it even with the built-in recovery features. It won't be able to fix it
So now going forward into the future if you were ever tempted in the slightest to delete system32
Just to see what happens now you don't have to and you can know that look
It's probably not even worth it to do with the friends because you probably won't even be able to fix it yourself and they will
Be kind of mad if they have to take it to a computer shop to reinstall windows and pack up all their data
Not really worth it. But anyway, hopefully this video was kind of fun wasn't too long. I don't think so
Let me know what you think down in the comment section. Have you ever accidentally deleted system32?
I'd love to hear about it. And also if you want to keep watching I'll put some other videos right here
You can just click on those and if you want to subscribe
I make a couple new videos every week, so it should be worth it. So, thanks again guys for watching
I'll see you next time. Have a good one