This one has bothered me for some time and I finally found the answer on how to correct it. Sometimes files will be copied from one system to another and the security attributes along with other aspects of the file (or folders in some cases) may not be complete after copying. I especially found this to be true after copy several music files from a Linux system to a Windows 7 machine (that is a war for another time friends). Needless to say, the EXT3 conversion to NTFS of file names and folders gets a little crazy sometimes.
The symptom is that you can not DELETE, MOVE, RENAME, or do anything else to the folder or file name. In my case I was attempting to backup some of my data to another drive for archiving reasons and got all kinds of errors. The security on the folders with the errors was shown like this:
"The requested security information is either unavailable or cannot be displayed." and had a red "X" displayed on the security tab.
So to correct it you have to go back to old DOS commands from the command prompt to delete the folders. Windows won't let you do it.
So do this:
Open a command prompt (type "CMD" at the run box and hit enter). Change to the folder where the file/folders are located and then type "dir /x" to make the output display the old DOS 8.3 file naming convention. Find the file or folder here and then type in the 8.3 name of the file or folder to delete. Like this:
9/12/2011 06:47 PM <DIR> KIDROC~2 Kid Rock - Cocky
9/12/2011 06:48 PM <DIR> KIDROC~4 Kid Rock - Rock-n-Roll Jesus
9/13/2011 10:31 PM <DIR> SKIDRO~1 Skid Row - Skid Row
9/13/2011 10:32 PM <DIR> SKIDRO~2 Skid Row - Slave to the Grin
9/12/2011 07:32 PM <DIR> UGLYKI~1 Ugly Kid Joe - America's Lea
t Wanted
9/12/2011 07:32 PM <DIR> UGLYKI~2 Ugly Kid Joe - Motel Califor
Enough laughing at the Music already! :)
So, if I wanted to delete the last folder in the list I would type "rmdir UGLYKI~2" if the folder is empty. If the folder also has files under it as well I simply tell it to use the /S switch (like this "rmdir UGLYKI~2 /S" ). It will ask if you are sure and you will tell it yes or no.
Keep in mind that sometimes the folder will be messed up, but the files IN the folder will be perfectly fine. I am not sure how Windows traverses the folder to get to the files inside if it see's the folder itself as being corrupt in a sense, but it does.If you want to copy the files UNDER this folder to another location first, you can do that before doing the delete (provided they are not corrupt as well).
The command for deleting a file would be the same basically, except substitute the "del" command for the "rmdir" command.
That is it. I hope that saves someone else some time out there. I am sure I would forget all of this by next week sometime. So, here is it! :)
