[ah_hup]

Hi i'm unable to delete this particular folder in my external hard disk. I have googled about this problem and followed almost all the steps, such as deleting in safe mode, command prompt 'chkdsk /f', try deleting it with unlocker programmes, command prompt 'rmdir /s', renaming the folder to another name and deleting it.. but the same error message still pops up.. this is my last resort which is asking for some advise here.

please refer to attached picture.



How can i get rid of this folder?

also if i say Yes for the following, will my stuff inside the hard disk be wiped out??

Edited by ah_hup, 04 February 2011 - 11:56 PM.

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any help?

[ah_hup]

any help?

[mikeloeven]

i think i might have an idea whats wrong but i really cant help if you keep hiding the folder name in your screenshots. but it sounds like a invalid naming issue. if the file was put there by a cough(torrent) or a improperly utalized robocopy command the filename can have a space at the end or if the origional folder was created on a mac it can contain invalid characters.

try formating the command
use del first than rmdir. del deletes the contents of the folder and rmdir removes the empty directory

del \\?\"drive:\folder"
rmdir \\?\"drive:\folder"


the quotation marks are part of the command and you need to include them i would recomend directly copying the foldername from explorer because that will catch grammer you might not see. to paste into the command prompt rightclick and paste normally ctrl^v doesent work

seeing as you know enough to use rmdir in the first place i can trust you to get the gist and not delete your entire movies folder

Edited by mikeloeven, 07 February 2011 - 09:12 PM.

[ah_hup]

hi i have tried both command and they both didnt worked.. here's the same error i encountered for both commands..
pls refer to picture.

[mikeloeven]

try the command again without the wildcard. try copying the exact name a wildcard may miss the invalid character.

if that doesent work what you want to do is unplug your external drive and than plug it back into the computer. after you plug it back in run chkdsk imediatly and that should prevent any program from ""locking the drive"" as for your origional post forcing a dismount of a volume doesent erase the volume. forcing a dismount is what you do every time you yank the usb cord out of the computer. well execpt that the os cant stop you from doing that with an annoying error message

but 9 times out of 10 the program accessing your drive is the windows indexing service. or a background virus scanner

Edited by mikeloeven, 08 February 2011 - 10:37 AM.

[ah_hup]

sorry i dun really understand u. what do u mean by 'wildcard'?

i will try out the steps again, once i get hold of an available laptop or pc.

[mikeloeven]

wildcards are * or ? when used in a dos operation. if you dont know the whole file name you can enter C:\folder\filen* and it will return the first match for filen which would be filename.

if you are unsure how to spell somthing you can also do c:\f?len?me and the computer will return the frist match of the missing characters.

when i said copy the filename i meant to click on the file as if you wanted to rename it and copying that whole line of text into the dos command incase you missed a space or other invalid character.

but at this point i would just run chkdsk it is indeed safe to force a dismount of the volume as long as you dont have any programs runing on the harddrive.

[Macboatmaster]

I would tend to go this route.

1. Open the directory G:\ Movies
What is in there.
Then if Frontiers 2007 is a separate directory I would open that if it will do so.
Depending on the structure I would then attempt a delete of all possible files or empty folders within that Frontiers2007.
I would then right click on whatever is left and scan just those files with your anti-virus.
I would then again attempt delete.

IF system restore is operating on the G drive I would establish a restore point before ATTEMPTING any of this.
Additionally if it was on system restore you would need to give consideration to restore points created previously, depending on what you find.

[mikeloeven]

judging by lack of a reply either he suceeded in deleting the file or he hasn't gotten around to running chkdsk yet

Edited by mikeloeven, 13 February 2011 - 10:20 AM.

[ah_hup]

i'm so sorry for the late reply. just came back from a short oversea trip.

anyway i didnt know what happen, i tried plugging in the hard disk to my friend's PC and apparently it went into scandisk while loading windows and when i reached windows, i could delete the folder without doing anything. this is so weird! but hey who cares once the folder is deleted right?

thanks for all the advices and i really appreciate it!