Unable to delete file

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Somehow I’ve got a file with a corrupt file-name (made up of a variety of random characters from seemingly different fonts.)

I can’t right-click the file in PowerDesk, Control3 or explorer. When I try to delete the parent folder it fails saying the file name is incorrect. I’ve even tried to delete it using Eraser – same message.

Any ideas how I can get rid of it?

TIA

William

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Sounds to me as though its not a file at all in the normal sense, but some left-over fragment.

1. Try deleting it from a DOS prompt

2. Try renaming it from a DOS prompt, then 1 or normal delete.

3. Run scandisk

4. Try 1 and 2 in Safe Mode

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Many thanks MerC – didn’t need to go beyond (1)

William

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Just back up more frequently from now on – the time this happened to me it was the prelude of major hard disc disasters.

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It’s just happened the once. Were your subsequent problems physical or logical?

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Physical. But disaster didn’t strike until I’d accumulated a few of these episodes – usually increasing in frequency and/or number.

It was quite a long time ago (a 520MB hard drive I seem to recall), so maybe I’m worrying you over nothing.

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Let’s hope so. Thanks for your concern – hope you don’t hear from me again!

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I once was able to rename a problematic file using VBScript and the FileSystemObject. The problem was that my script had a bug and tacked on extra characters to resolve naming conflicts. The name got so long it could not be deleted through Windows Explorer. However, in code, I was able to rename the file. Unfortunately, I don’t know what I did with that script, but maybe the attached sample will get you started with the FileSystemObject. It asks you for a path to a folder, and then a string to add at the beginning of the file names in that folder, and then updates all the names, stopping for guidance if the prefix causes the name to exceed 64 characters. (This was used as part of our transition to a document management system where the folder name provided critical information that otherwise could not be imported.)

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