Sooner or later, we all come across some stubborn files that make you use half a dozen tricks and still won’t be deleted. There could be so many reasons why a file is refusing to be deleted from your hard disk, but the most common cause is that the file in question is locked by some other program. This means that some other program has opened that file for some reason and unless that program is closed and the file handle is released, this file will stay locked. The problem is that you do not really know which program has locked the file or how to release the file handle.
The free program DeadLock can take care of such locked files and allows you to either unlock them or to display all the programs that could have locked that file. If you are not able to delete a file, then drag-n-drop it on the DeadLock window and it will analyze that file to show you the full path, ownership and the locked status.
At this point, you can right-click on the locked file and choose to unlock it. If you do not have the ownership rights, then you may have to take the ownership of the locked file first. For this, you can right-click on the locked file and select the ownership options. If you are having trouble unlocking the file right-away, you can try a second method of moving the file on Windows reboot. Once a file is unlocked, you can delete or rename it.
Conclusion: DeadLock is a very useful tool for the times when a stubborn file just won’t get deleted in Windows. You can use this to unlock locked files, take ownership of files, move them to another location, and find out the processes that could be locking these files.
You can download DeadLock from http://codedead.com/.