The Mysterious Undeletable File!

[AngelicKnight]

I'm just chock-full of wierd problems this week!

Today's issue:

Just bought a new Iomega REV drive. We backed up most of our data server to it last night as a test. Checked it today. Everything's there. However, we backed up a couple folders to many on accident, so I went into the drive to erase the extra two folders. Can't delete them.

One of them is a temp folder. Looked like there was a particular file that was refusing to be deleted, so I went into the folder and started deleting everything a chunk at a time until I pinpointed the problem file. Sure enough, I managed to clean out the entire folder except for one file that refuses to delete, entitled "Improve your cell phone reception." (The file name has a couple of lines worth of spaces at the end as well, and no file extension.) I try to delete it, and get this error:

Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk.

So I tried opening the file in notepad to see what it looked like, of course expecting unreadable gobbledy-gook. Instead, I got this error:

Cannot find F:\...\Improve your cell phone reception. Do you want to create a new file?

So all I gotta say to that is...Huh?!

[cacosapo]

maybe it has invalid chars as filename (not spaces)? go there rename it to something "Normal" and try again.

[AngelicKnight]

I'm getting lazy.

Google provided my answer.

There's a way to do a del command that will bypass most problems. Type "del \\.\drivename\dir\..." and that should delete just about anything, given you use the "\\.\" on the front end. And sure enough, that fixed my problem!

[|3lack|ce]

Cannot find F:\...\Improve your cell phone reception. Do you want to create a new file?

*shudder*

Glad you got that fixed.