Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!lll-winken!xanth!mcnc!rti!bcw
From: bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Directory Problems
Summary: Also Norton or Mace ...
Message-ID: <3379@rti.UUCP>
Date: 1 Jan 90 17:02:18 GMT
References: <111700189@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> <2641@draken.nada.kth.se>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 43

In article <2641@draken.nada.kth.se>, d88-eli@nada.kth.se (Erik Liljencrantz) writes:
> In article <111700189@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> sfn20715@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
> >[...]      Because of this,
> >programs like XTree, when looking for all of the files on disk will find
> >\tp5\source and then \tp5\source\tp5\source\tp5\source\tp5\source (you get
> >the idea), and then crash, proclaiming "too many files."
> 
> I helped a friend at work with exactly this problem just a couple of days ago.
> CHKDSK will trap that recursiveness of the directorytree, and you are able
> to convert it to a file (use chkdsk /f). This file is probably empty and
> you can delete it. Chkdsk will also find lost clusters on the disk,
> which is also converted to files. This might be the case if your original
> directory (/tp5/source) contained any files.

I agree that this is probably the first thing you should do, if you
haven't already done so.  It's difficult over the net to know if a
suggestion like this is too "obvious" ... and some people get offended
if the advice is at too low or too high a level.

Chkdsk (for those who are new to PC's) is well worth knowing about.
However, there are a lot of types of corruption that it can't deal
with very effectively.  If you find that you can't deal with it with
chkdsk, you might be able to fix the problem with either the Norton
or the Mace utilities.  The Norton Advanced Edition (which I am most
familiar with) has a "Disk Doctor" program which is sort of like an
enhanced chkdsk that can fix a LOT more problems than chkdsk.

You can also (if you are reasonably knowledgeable -- and brave) fix
problems that even the Disk Doctor can't fix by using the byte-level
disk editor in the Norton Utilities.  I have managed to recover a
trashed root directory in this way (all directories and all files
wiped from the root directory by a bug in a program ... no, not mine,
and not one from a bbs ... a commercial product ... and not the
infamous DOS FORMAT problem that allows you to easily wipe the root
directory and the FAT for your hard disk).  Even the "UNDELETE"
function (which is a semiautomated version of this, and which is
included in the utilities), didn't help recover the files -- things 
were too corrupted for UNDELETE to work [AAARRRGGGHHH!!!].  It's not 
very much fun to do this, but with those utilities it's *possible*,
and if you know what you are doing not even terribly difficult, but 
*awfully* boring and time-consuming.

						Bruce C. Wright