NTFS Folder has no owner, no permissions, can't be deleted

I have a folder a 2003 member server which can't be deleted. Nothing has any permissions (domain admin and running up a cmd prompt as "nt authority\system" using psexec) - always "access denied".

When I do a dir /q, the owner shows as "...".

I've tried takeown.exe on the folder and also it's parent. The bad folder always reports "access denied". Also tried to reset using icacls, same thing.

Explorer permissions has no sharing & security options or tabs. It works fine for other folders, even in the same directory.

I've seen something similar to this. What ended up being the case is that the file was deleted while there were still outstanding locks on it. I couldn't do a darned thing to it. Clearing the outstanding locks caused the file to fully delete.

I'd run CHKDSK on the volume before I did anything else. Are you seeing any messages in the System Event Log re: filesystem corruption (source "NTFS")?

Had the same issue but no files had a lock on it, it just managed to lose all of it's owners.

Solution was to use TakeOwn

takeown /F dirname

Will take ownership of the file to the current user. Use /A after the dirname to assign it to the system administrator.