Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!watdragon!dahlia!swklassen
From: swklassen@dahlia.waterloo.edu (Steven W. Klassen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Volume labels on hard drives
Message-ID: <15591@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 2 Aug 89 15:23:58 GMT
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: swklassen@dahlia.waterloo.edu (Steven W. Klassen)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 35

Here's a problem which I have never seen before.

I screwed up in my download of emacs (I shall try it again soon) and
somehow the download seems to have created a file which TOS thinks is
a volume label.  This doesn't show up on the normal directory but can
be seen using the 'ls -la' command from msh.  When I copied stuff to
install emacs on my hard drive (Atari megafile 60) this file which
thinks it is a volume label somehow got copied to my hard drive.  I 
first noticed it when I tried to delete the temporary directory
which it was located in.  msh will not let me delete the directory as
long as this file which thinks it is a volume label is present but
also will not allow me to delete the file.  Hence I can't get rid
of my temporary directory.

I then tried to delete it from the desktop.  As I mentioned the 
file does not show up on the desktop (hence you can't delete it).
When I try to drag the entire directory which contains the 
problem to the trash I get an error message something along
the line of an object of this name already existing.

Can anyone out there help me?  I _really_ don't want to reformat
and hence reinstall everything on my 60meg hard drive!!!!!

Can I somehow 'fool' this file into thinking it is really a file
and not a volume label (and hence delete it) or does someone
have a utility which will let me manually kill only this file
(or the directory containing it)?

Question for Atari:  How can something like this get there in
the first place?


Steven W. Klassen
Computer Science Major
University of Waterloo