file attribute HSA

[Guest]

Hi David!

First, I appologize for misleading you. I always mixup the terms files,
folders and directories, both in french and english, so in defrag post, when
I said that the windows\0 file had 800 files in it, I was full of it. what I
meant was actually that the FILE windows\0 had over 800 fragments in it.
Once again I got caught trying to do too may things too fast at the same
time.

Second, I find it interresting to see the message about the other fellow who
had the same problem as me. I missed his post when I originally searched the
issue, but I sure am interrested to find out how he fixed it.

Third, I have posted at http://pages.videotron.com/steph1/first_page
the results of trying to change the attributes of my mysterious files,
rename, or delete. It all failed as you will see in <some_tests>.

Fourth, I tried a defrag, in safe mode just to alleviate as many
possibilities as I could, and I also posted the results in <DefragReport>.
From the report, we can see that my Mozzila inbox still has some fragmented
data, but that is a small problem compared to the 0, 4, 6, 8 (and 9, S, Y)
files. Note that even though 0,9, S and Y don,t report as fragmented, they
are the exact same size, attributes and date modified as 0, 4, 6 and 8.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Steph.

Now I get it with the SFN and LFN. Fubnny, I tought that DOS was
completelly
out of the system since Win 2000! I guess I was wrong!

Yes, MS-DOS is completely gone (except just enough to let WinXP create an
MS-DOS boot floppy). But Win2K and WinXP include an emulator that many
consider "a better DOS than DOS". In WinXP, just click Start | All Programs
| Accessories | Command Prompt, or Start | Run and enter Cmd.exe. This will
open what I call a "DOS" window, with "DOS" in quotes to emphasize that it
is not true MS-DOS. In this window, nearly all the old familiar MS-DOS
commands will work just about like they always did. And most of the old
MS-DOS applications will still run, the exceptions being those that
manipulated the hardware directly (like games, especially), because WinXP
deals with hardware through the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), which
MS-DOS never heard of, and won't allow direct manipulation by those
programs.

As I said and Wes explained much better, each file must have a valid 8.3
filename. If the LFN qualifies as an SFN, then it is used; otherwise, an
SFN that qualifies under the old familiar 8.3 rules is created and stored in
the directory, in addition to the LFN. Long File Name is a slight misnomer
because some very short names don't qualify. For example, "A FILE" is only
6 characters, but one of them is a space, which MS-DOS would not allow, so
the SFN "afile~1" is created. See for yourself. Type: md "a file". Dir
will show "a file" (without the quotes). Dir /x will show both "a file" and
"afile~1".

But what do we want to know from the SFN?

The reason I asked you to type dir /x was to see if any illegal characters
were hiding within the apparently valid filenames "Windows" and "0". The
results you posted show that no such tricks exist. Your 0, 4, 6, etc.,
files are just that: very large files with those very short names within
the Windows folder.

So now all you have to do is (a) delete those files that are taking up 1.4
GB each of your hard drive space, and (b) figure out what is causing such
files to be created in the first place. Have you tried the ideas that David
Candy has posted in the other sub-thread?

RC

 

[David Candy]

I want to see the first little bit of the file. Try to open the file with notepad, wordpad, or word (use Recover Text From Any File converter). Post the first two pages of english you can find.

[I continue a day and a sleep later, the cricket got interesting. Australia is sooooooooo good and has been for years that there is little doubt in most games. But we were on the ropes yesterday and last night but won easily against the West Indies in the end]

To do the above, boot from Windows XP CD (you do have a CD that is a MS CD rather than a Dell CD, if not boot from these floppies http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q310/9/94.ASP ), you need to read your computer manual (EG not XP but Dell or whoever) to see how to make your computer boot from CD or floppy. It may already be setup in the BIOS to boot from either of these if there is a bootable CD/Floppy in the drive. Read about boot order in the BIOS section of your manual. You access the bios on most computers by pressing holding delete as soon as you power on. But check your manual. Dell's only an example, a lot of their particular computers come with MS and Dell CDs but most other brands aren't as nice and give you computer manufacturer's CDs only or no CDs.

Then when Windows Setup starts it will ask you to press R to Repair. This takes you to a Recovery Command Prompt.

Type here

copy c:\windows\0 c:\windows\Old0.txt
exit

Type Help for help.


Then boot back to Windows, open Old0.txt in notepad or what ever and copy the first few pages of english text and a selection of other english in the file if it appears different. Should their be french just indicate if it looks like program words or your data but even french programs use english commands internally (as there is only english).

We can use the same method to delete the file but I'm not convinced it's not something important.

In your directory list you had directories and files with names like VIRTPART.DAT and MYSHAR~1 My Shared Folder which indicate you have some virtual hard disk and some network activity?

 

[Guest]

Well, it had to happen!
I was trying some stuff from Norton clean sweep.
I tried to uninstall some left overs from Mozzila suit. I use Foxilla and
thunderbird so I uninstalled Mozzila some time ago.

I tought that it was taking a long time and started getting that feeling
that something was going wrong, so I tried to stop the application... that
didn't work, so I rebooted.

Now all Symantec is gone, my toolbars, every bit of Microsoft programs,
Firefox, Thunderbird, my desktop image, most icons and I haven't looked at
the rest. This is exactly what I could not afford timewise.

So what do I do now?

Do I reformat my C drive and reinstall over 50 programs or is there
something I can restore? (all I found in the trash box was some music I
trashed this afternoon).

Help!

 

[David Candy]

I'm glad you're asking RC White this?

You would have to say exactly what you did. Are those big files still there?

 

[Guest]

Well, I did the repair thing.

Still had to re-install every piece of software that had anything to do with
the C drive (that was Office, Project, Visio, Virtual PC, Adobe, Firefox,
Thunderbird, Front page and on and on and on).

At least it fixed the System Restore which had never worked and I was able
to delete my mysterious files without them popping back up again.

Conclusion...

I should have reformatted the C drive.

It would have been so much easier, a heck of a lot faster and it would have
cleaned-up all the old leftover data from removed software or registry.

Norton cleansweep is what killed my programs data.
Norton is no longer on my computer!

What worked well...

Most of my programs are on a different partition, which saved me a lot of
hassles;
All my documents are on another partition, and so are my backups (needed
them to restore my outlook, Firefox and Thunderbird data);
And,
This group has some fantastic fellows that did spend a great deal of time
trying to help me.

Thank you fellows!