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Tech Tips / Windows NT / Disk and File Management

The drive cannot be locked for exclusive use

Like it's not bad enough that your mirror failed and you had to break it. Now you can't delete a partition from the broken mirror. When you try to delete a partition that was part of a broken mirror set, you receive this error message: "The drive cannot be locked for exclusive use. Please check to see if some applications are currently accessing the drive. If so, close them and try again."

First, check to see if any of the conditions listed below apply as the standard reason(s) for not being able to lock a volume:

• A paging file is on the volume.
• A program that was started from the volume is still running.
• A program that's running has loaded a .dll file from the volume.
• A program has a file open on the volume.
• A program's current folder is on the volume.
• A service has a lock on the volume.

If none of these apply, you can use Disk Administrator to select the partition you wish to delete. Use Tools | Assign Drive Letter To and then choose Do Not Assign A Drive Letter and click OK. You should now be able to successfully delete the partition.