Note to self: How to Delete Files w/names That Are Too Big

[Vin DSL]

Gawd! What a night...

I was horsing around with Robocopy, and decided to use it to mirror my C-Drive to D-drive, but after about an hour of my CPU sitting at 100%, I decided to call it quits. Simply enough, right?

Well, when I tried to kill the partial backup, I discovered I had migrated a worm that I didn't know had been sitting on C-drive for over a year. It's probably the one that killed my machine last summer -- deleted everything that had to do with Microsoft...

Anyway, it was sitting in the Temporary Internet Files for my old profile. No harm, except I couldn't delete it. I tried running Symantec's FixSbigF.exe utility, but the filename was so big that it crashed it.

Finally, after racking my brain for hours, I tried the good ol' RD command from CLI, and it worked. Yeeeessss!!!

Simply use RD to delete the whole directory!

rd /q /s [drive:]path

Make sure to use "path" (quotes around the path) if you have spaces in the names...

[Ron]

How about using a wildcard to match the start or a part of the fn?

[Vin DSL]

How about using a wildcard to match the start or a part of the fn?

Heh! Hi, Ron... this is Vin! That's the first thing I tried -- then, all the other tricks...

I actually had a couple of problems. The other one was, I couldn't empty the stupid Recycle Bin either, 'cause it contained an empty folder that W2K said wasn't empty -- hello?!?!?! -- a folder in the trash wasn't empty, so Windows couldn't empty it, even though it was good enough to get there in the first place. Hahahaha!

I ended up having to restore the empty/non-empty folder so I could delete it permanently. I did this by using a handy little utility called 'DirectoryFixer'. That permanently renames everything in a folder, even if it apparently doesn't exist. I *guess* it had some invisible specialchars in the name, like maybe a carriage return, bell, or whatever.

In 'the process', so called, I somehow deleted all my program files, starting with names from A-D -- either that, or these weird un-deletable files and folders were somehow cross-linked with them -- even though doing several disk-checks said everything was fine...

Anyway, it was hours of fun -- or not!

[Gwaihir]

I'll go try my hands on that DirectoryFixer. I have a few folders with bad names lingering that I still wish to remove. (Stuff copied from linux to windows that has names like .settings that drive Windows mad.)

[Vin DSL]

I'll go try my hands on that DirectoryFixer.

Yep, that thing is a 'keeper'!

I did a defrag on my drives last night. C-drive was almost totally fragmented. About 10% into the defrag, it stopped and said it noticed the drive was scheduled for a FSCK... whatever CHKDSK... so, I stopped everything, scheduled a 'check disk' myself, and did a reboot. Tick, tick, tick, time for a snack...

The second time, the defrag worked -- took, like, 5 hours. I ran off my USB thumbdrive while it was doing its' thing on C-drive. Then, I went to bed, and left it to defrag D-drive. [fingercrossed] Everything appears to be fine now! [/fingerscrossed]

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In the meantime, I've given up on the idea of using Robocopy (part of the Windows Server Resource Kit, if you've never heard of it -- works on both W2K/XP) to backup my drives -- that is, except for my thumb drive. Robocopy works GREAT for that -- been using it forever (another jewel in the rough)!

I went surfing for a backup utility...

SyncBack looked promising, but I didn't like the interface or the results. As the name implies, it's a sync utility turned backup. The thing is, I can do this with Robocopy, so...

Anyway, like Goldilocks, I eventually found one that was 'just right' -- Cobian Black Moon, e.g. Cobian Backup 8. It'll run as a service (if you choose), is very well-mannered (doesn't use 100% of the system resources), has a simple interface, yada, yada, yada.

I don't know what you're using for backups, but you might want to give Cobian a whirl too...

[Vin DSL]

Hahaha! OMG! I just realized Cobian is doing another full backup in the background!!!

Evidently, when I setup the 'scheduled task', it defaulted to doing a 'full backup' daily. My fault!

Damn Black Moon n00b, I am!