Can You DESTROY Your Computer by Deleting ONE File?

is it possible to ruin your whole computer by deleting just one file in windows while it's running could you possibly screw up that bad even by accident that's exactly what we're going to be trying out in this video in real life at a computer and i was actually curious myself because i've done videos in the past where just for fun i would delete things like the entire system 32 folder or the entire windows registry and of course that would ruin the computer but i wanted to know if there was a single file that was important enough where deleting just that one would render your computer useless and it turns out as a little bit of a spoiler it's a little bit more difficult than i initially imagined because windows has a lot of built-in safeguards to save people from themselves but it is in fact possible so we're going to go through the most important files in windows delete them and see what happens and obviously i need to tell you guys don't do this on your real computer or a friend's computer i'm going to be doing this in a virtual machine which will behave exactly the same as a regular computer but doing this on your own computer could ruin it even if it doesn't seem to do it online just be aware that before we get started i do want to thank the sponsor of this video privacy.com you probably have heard me talk about this before it's a great service and website that i've used for years myself privacy.com is a free service that allows you to create unique virtual payment cards to buy things online instead of using your real card everywhere therefore protecting your banking and identity information you can do things like creating single-use burner cards or so-called merchant cards which only work at one retailer so the card won't work anywhere else even if that number happens to get stolen plus there's other features like setting limits on cards so you'll never have to worry about getting overcharged there's card sharing a chrome extension that can autofill card details and also iphone and android apps and for a limited time if you sign up now by going to privacy.com theojo new users are gonna get five dollars for free to spend on your first purchase so yes it's a free service and you're getting a free signup bonus pretty cool all you'll have to do is link a checking account so that you know you can actually pay for stuff that you bought so again be sure to go to privacy.com theojo and you can also check that same link in the description and now without further ado let's get to the fun part of trying to ruin another computer so the first file that i thought for sure would actually ruin the computer is the windows kernel file so the kernel of windows and really any operating system is like the core file that kind of interfaces with all the drivers the hardware that sort of thing it's like the core of the operating system and if you delete that it pretty much should ruin the operating system and in windows this file is known as ntos kernel dot exe and is located right in system 32. now because this is a core system file you'll probably notice if you look in the system32 folder it will not appear even if you do have hidden files and folders enabled in the file explorer so you actually have to go in and change another setting which is to uncheck hide protected operating system files and if you try to do this you will get a warning it says you have chosen to display protected operating system files in file explorer these files are required to start and run windows deleting or editing them will make your computer inoperable are you sure you want to display these files so obviously we do so we can delete it and then now you will notice that this file does appear and surprisingly the entire windows core kernel file is only around 10 megabytes it's right there now normally if you try to just go and delete it there are some protections that will prevent you from doing this to save you from yourself and it will warn you that this is controlled by the trusted installer system account so instead we'll have to do is change the ownership so you can delete the file i'm not going to go through how to do this whole process because it's a little bit involved but if you really want to know you can probably just look it up yourself so anyway after we do that gain control of the file we can simply right click and delete it and surprisingly nothing actually happens noticeably i assume this is because the file is really only used at startup and maybe in other situations but for the most part it's not really used while windows is running so what we can do is simply restart the computer and see what happens and of course as you can see it immediately notices something is wrong and it starts to automatically try and repair the windows installation and to my surprise it actually was able to succeed it simply repaired or replaced the file and booted up like normally i thought for sure that if the kernel was deleted surely that would ruin the installation but it turns out that's not the case now if you didn't have some kind of recovery partition obviously that would probably be a problem but it seems like it's pretty easy to actually fix a deleted kernel which i thought was the most important file and that would ruin it but no so then i was really thinking man if deleting the windows kernel can't ruin the computer is there even anything so then i thought about another one the windload.exe file this file is known as the bootloader and this actually loads the kernel file and core device drivers so this actually is loaded before the kernel's loaded so i thought maybe if i prevent windows from even loading then it won't even be able to do the repair even if it tries to do it so i deleted that file going through the same process you have to take permission of it and then right click and delete it and then again nothing really happens here until i restart because it's only going to be activated during windows restart so i restart it and again windows does an automatic repair and again it actually succeeds so at this point any normal person should probably be happy that windows can actually do a decent job of repairing even some of the most important files being deleted but right now i'm annoyed because i want to ruin this computer so the next one i tried is hal.dll this is a critical dll file which is known as the hardware abstraction layer and this is basically how the computer connects the kernel to the hardware like the cpu and the chipset and stuff so then i was thinking well maybe if i delete this then again you know if the operating system can't even connect to the chipset then maybe it will fail to do the repair but sure enough when i delete it and restart it yes again this is able to be completely repaired using the automatic repair tool so next i thought well you know what let's try and go after the registry because i remember in one of my old videos i tried deleting a bunch of the registry keys in the registry editor and that did actually ruin everything so what i did is went to the actual registry file for the system keys which is just called system in system 32 but unfortunately i was not able to actually delete this file because it was in use and even after trying several things like trying to use the command prompt to force windows to delete it it simply would not cooperate because it was just in use the whole time so this doesn't really work because while i am confident if you were able to delete one of these videos it would ruin the windows installation it doesn't satisfy my requirement of being able to delete one file while windows is running so i can't delete it while it's running so it's not going to count so finally i realized what had to be done because windows was able to keep accessing the repair partition and all that to be able to just replace any missing files i would have to do something that would prevent windows from even starting up in the first place so it couldn't even get to the point of trying to repair it so therefore i realized i had to go after the boot manager basically the boot manager tells the computer what operating systems are even installed on the hard drive and boot manager if you select windows will then actually activate win load which is the boot loader so the boot manager actually happens before the boot load so for example if you've ever seen this screen which comes up if you have multiple installations of windows telling you which operating system you want to boot from this is the boot manager and then you select it and then it boots into the operating system so if we delete this theoretically it shouldn't even be able to load any operating systems at all now in some cases apparently the boot manager is located on the primary installation partition of windows so the c drive but in this case and i think in most cases actually it's actually located in the system reserve partition it which is created when you install windows and this partition is normally not even visible if you go into the disk manager you will see it's there but it will not have a letter assigned to the drive so what we can do is just add a letter and assign it to drive so we can access it through file explorer and normally if you look in this folder it will look completely empty because these are all hidden system files so again you do have to enable file explorer to show system files and hidden files and once you do that you'll then see that there are several important system files in here including the file that's just called boot manager which is one of the very first things that the computer even looks at so no surprise this file is also protected by trusted installer so we take ownership of that just delete it and now we can restart for the moment of truth and sure enough this time around it doesn't try to repair windows we simply get the error and operating system wasn't found try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system press control alt delete to restart so now windows is unable to repair the installation because as far as the computer understands there's not even a windows installation to repair in the first place so it looks like we have succeeded we have made the computer unusable by deleting just one file it took a little bit of work but we have done it now is your computer technically ruined beyond repair well no not really because the windows installation is still there all the files are still there it's just that the computer doesn't know that it would take a little bit of extra work but theoretically you could get a windows installation disk or repair disk and put it in it might be able to auto detect and do a repair or you might have to manually go through and somehow rebuild the boot manager so while i'm sure it is possible to fix yes it would take some work so anyway thanks again to privacy.com for sponsoring this video and again if you go to privacy.com theojo new users for a limited time are going to be able to get five dollars for free to apply to your first purchase so hopefully you enjoyed this video if you guys want to keep watching the next video i'd recommend is why you should never make in-app purchases in smartphone apps before watching this video because you'll save a bunch of money and you'll just have to watch it to see why but i highly recommend it so thanks again for watching guys and i'll see in the next video

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 734,178

Rating: 4.9086442 out of 5

Keywords: technology, tech, windows, windows delete system32, windows critical files, windows 10, microsoft windows, microsoft, computers, computer, windows computer, windows tricks, windows tips

Id: IZQ72ognqac

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020