File not found, but it's right there

Tom wrote:


Hi,

The computer is home built running WinXP Pro SP1 for the past 6 months
with no major problems. The hard drive is a Western Digital 120 GB PATA
and formatted as two NTFS partitions running off an ASUS motherboard
controller as slot 0,0.

A couple of hours ago I went to add some text to a file I had been
working on. I started Notepad, clicked 'Open...', navigated to the
directory and selected the file. I clicked the open button and received
a "File not found" error dialog box. I could see the file in the open
requester, but it would not open.

I started Power Desk (a file manager) and navigated to where the file is
located. That's when I noticed one of the 32 files in the directory was
being listed with blue text in the directory lister. Normally, black
text is used to display a directories contents. According to Power Desk,
blue text means that it's a compressed NTFS file or folder. Which it
isn't or shouldn't.

While the icon shows the correct association for the TXT file type, it
also shows the "Sharing" hand at the bottom. I checked and it does not
show up as a shared file or directory. Nor does it show up in the
Notepad Open requester as having the "sharing" hand, just a normal TXT
icon.

A right-click on the file shows a short brief context menu (with no
properties option) instead of my normal tall context menu. Doing a ALT +
Double-Click brings up properties, but for the most part it is blank and
shows Size(on Disk) as "0 bytes".

Double-Clicking the file brings up the editor, but fails to load the
file into the editor.

The file name shows a TXT extension, but the files show up as NOT having
any extension if I expand the EXTension column at the top of the
directory lister.

I've run Norton Disk Doctor, CHKDSK and Easy Recovery Pro's disk
diagnostic and they tell me that there is nothing wrong with the drive
and its contents.

Here's the really odd part, at least to me. From Power Desk's left
directory lister pane, if I copy and paste the parent directory to a
different location, the file is completely recovered in the process. I
can not copy the file directly, but copying the whole directory does
work to recover the file.

Also in this directory are three files which have reverted to the 8.3
file name scheme for a total of four effected files that have had
something recently happen to them.

The common factor that I can see is that all four files had long
filenames and were the top four longest of the 32 files contained in the
directory. The shortest of the four was 113 characters and the longest
of the four was 135 characters. This dead file was the 113 character
file name. So, the dead file didn't happen just because it was the
longest.

I suppose to recover I could just copy everything in there and delete
the directory (I hope I can delete the directory and it is not 'used by
something else').

Is this is a NTFS burp? Something I should be more worried about? Anyone
know what happened?

What does Windows File Manager show? If it show the file and behaves
normally, the problem would be a PowerDesk bug.

Thanks for reading.


--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)