Okay, I have the 2.55" HD from my old dell laptop in a new case and am using it as an external. Since it has the entire contents of my old dell on it- I'm desperately trying to clear them out. Thing is, I'm getting a LOT of access denied errors regarding folders in WINDOWS, Documents and Setting, Adobe, on top of others. Is there an easy way to circumvent these errors and delete things? If not I suppose I could make all the excess files hidden and TRY to pretend they are not there- could get annoying though.

If you're logged in as an administrator on your new computer, you can try taking ownership of the files and folders.

In Windows XP Professional this can be done by clicking on the Advanced button on the Security tab on the Properties dialog then going to the Owner tab.

I'm not sure if this is available in Windows XP Home or the various Vista versions.

A couple things helped-

A program called "Unlocker" to force-delete pesky files;

Then simply right clicking on the drive and formatting it.

Didn't realize a format was THAT easy when you didn't have to worry about losing everything =)