I have a file on my desktop that got messed up with the Firefox download. When you download, Firefox creates a file called .part as well. Lost the internet while I was downloading, now that .part file won't delete. I get an error saying: "Cannot delete file: Cannot read from source file or disk". I can't move it, rename it, do anything to it.

Any way to delete it?

Is Firefox open when you're trying to delete it? Use ProcessExplorer to delete any handles on it from other programs, also, have you tried logging on and off, or restarting explorer? The file might just appear to be there.

I tried with Firefox open and while it's closed. The file has been sitting there for days, hoping it would just disappear after some restarts. I tried ProcessExplorer and didn't find any handles linking to the file. How do I restart explorer?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 31 2009, 11:48 am by Souma.

Just end explorer.exe in Task Manager and then run it again.

Also, you might want to check your actual Desktop folder and see if the file is in there as well.

if it isnt big like only a few KB you could always just set it to hidden and ignore it, then sometime in the future youll turn on view hidden and see it then youll be able to delete it because over time w/e having it open has ended

Try using Unlocker on the file, even if it finds no handles tell it you want to delete the file. It'll try several different methods to delete it. Googling^[1][2] shows several other people have had success with Unlocker and with another method where you rename the problematic file from commandline to match DOS 8.3 naming conventions and then deleting.

I prefer booting into safe mode, or booting into something like linux, then deleting those files there. My old computer had a pure command prompt version of windows, which made it ridiculously easy to delete any file I wanted.

Rebooting the computer would solve this, unless

1) Your filesystem is corrupt.
2) A program or virus is accessing the file on startup.

hmmm.. then as Heinermann points out, it's using something on startup. You might try safemode reboot as above user suggested.

Most of the Google results for that exact error message had people saying they had trouble deleting it even after restarts and boots into safe mode. Skimmed over the answers, but it seems that NTFS allows file names/paths that the standard Win32 API doesn't play nice with.

For example, you can have files ending with a '.' on a NTFS partition and windows will show the file in a directory listing, you just can't do much to it. This page details a method of getting around some of the limits the Win32 API places on file names, specifically: prepending \\?\ to the path when performing operations (such as from command line and batch files).

Elvang's method worked. I used Unlocker and deleted it. It found no handles as well.

Thanks for the replies!