I had another problem with my computer which was harder than it needed to be to sort out so I thought I would post the answer here in the hopes that it will help others.

I have Google Drive installed on my home computer. When I couldn’t get Windows 7 to update one of the thigns I tried was to reinstall Windows 7. The reinstallation went smoothly, though it didn’t fix the problem of Windows 7 not updating. One small problems I had was that I needed to reinstall several drivers, and also my google drive flder became unlinked and it wouldn’t relink. When attempting to relink the folder a message come up saying that the folder I was attempting to relink already has files in it and that I had to provide a new empty folder.

So I made a new, empty Google Drive Folder and relinked that with Google Drive, and it synched with my Google Drive on the net and is now functioning properly.

The next problem I had was that I couldn’t delete the old Google Drive folder. The error messages that came up was:

“You’ll need to provide administrator permission to delete this folder”

I was already logged in as administrator and the message did not say anything about what was required inorder to provide administrator permission (I wish error messages would say what they needed in order to solve the problem).

It is one of those problems that the forums are full of, with people looking for a solution. For some reason there are countless responses which are unhelpful.

This is the solution that worked for me.

One of the suggestions I came across on the web was to open an “elevated command prompt”.

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/185893-youll-need-provide-administrator-permission-delete-folder.html

It gave a link to this web page that describes how to do that:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/55721-folder-delete-command-prompt.html

There were five different options and it was near midnight so I didn’t really understand many of them, but again the one that worked for me was:

• Click Start
• Type cmd into the search box
• Right click on the cmd.exe program that comes up
• Choose Run as administrator
• Type: RD /S /Q “the exact path to your folder you are trying to delete” (NB: include the quote marks)

For me this was:
RD /S /Q “C:\Users\Haydn\Google Drive”

I pressed return and the folder was instantly deleted.

It was amazing. I hope this helps others out there with this problem.