The File That Wouldn’t Die
Posted on December 7, 2007
5 Comments
Here’s a little something interesting that showed up yesterday on our dev server at work. Check these two file property dialogs out:
Do you see what’s different between these two PDFs? One has Security and Summary tabs. The other doesn’t!
Result? The one not showing those tabs is totally borked. Can’t open it. Can’t copy it. Can’t delete it. Can’t rename it. Can’t seem to do anything with it.
After a quick search, I noticed that one reason that the Security tab might not show is due to security issues. So, I attempted to reset ownership on the containing directory and checked the box to cascade that through the files and sub-directories under it. Unfortunately, I received another “no access” error message. Since I tried that as Domain Admin, I’m going to assume that’s not the problem I need to solve here.
Next, I ran good old chkdsk on this machine and had a mixture of results. The first couple times it simply blew up when going to “stage 2.” That prompted me to start taking notes (and this article).
However, while running chkdsk for a 3rd time (I wanted a screen shot) it actually made it a bit further:
I think I’ll run chkdsk /f (fixes things, not read-only) tomorrow morning and see if this can be straightened out. Hopefully it’s going to be that simple.If anyone has better ideas before tomorrow morning I’m all ears. (no Vox, I can’t switch this server to Linux just to fix one goofy file! 
)
Tags: chkdsk, error, security, server, Windows
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5 Responses to “The File That Wouldn’t Die”
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No need to change it to linux…just use knoppix to boot, get rid of the file and reboot without the CD, everything is done.
On the other hand, once I found a file I couldn’t get rid of on a windows box…not even with linux….had to format, after I realized that it wasn’t the only corrupted file and that it wasn’t a one-time event but it was happening now and then…never found out the reason, but I suspect either a virus or something that corrupted the filesystem driver.
How embarrassing! I didn’t even think to try my knoppix boot disk. Good idea, might have to try that if chkdsk fails me…
“no Vox, I can’t switch this server to Linux just to fix one goofy file!”
It’s not just one goofy file that needs fixing according to the list of them there.
Perhaps you should switch the server to Linux to fix ALL the goofy files.
Just throwing it out there is all.
Only one file actually has an issue :-p
I *know* chkdsk will fix the listed ones (in the screenshot). Hopefully that’ll “cascade” into fixing my problem file as well. If not, on to Plan B.
I’d like to consider SpinRite for this, but the drive in question is actually a hardware RAID mirror. If I knew which one was primary I’d just yank it. Alas, I haven’t figured that out. Yet.
The chkdsk fixed it and turned up some other file system issues. After a series of boot-time chkdsk operations, all seems to be fine now.