Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

Did you try hitting update driver in device manager. Sometimes that can sort out a wrinkle.

fucking ridiculous problem. Ok, I've downloaded some files to my external drive w/ slsk. but navigating to the directory: they aren't there. refresh. not there. go back to slsk. select my "finished" file, choose "open file." it opens up in winamp. file info: I can see the path to the file, it's right there: f:\unsorted\albumname\path_to_file.mp3. the track is playing. It IS there! go back to explorer to find it: nope, nothing there! refresh a hundred times. Not there. Search entire computer. Not there.

Copy that path into the location bar of Internet Explorer (which is just another way of dealing with windows explorer), truncate the file name so it's just the path: f:\unsorted\albumname\ There are all the files. go up a directory: can't find the directory albumname.

WHAT THE FUCK????

try searching for "windows xp files hidden not showing up" and you get the standard bullshit about viewing hidden system files which isn't what I'm trying to do.

I'm worried this might be a drive problem. It also doesn't seem to be consistent. For instance, it happened to some stuff I downloaded two days ago, but not yesterday, but it happened today. No rhyme or reason.

Run a scandisk on the drive.

Is it formatted NTFS or FAT32?

ntfs

I've got one.

I'm at my mom's house and her computer runs S L O W. It's windows 98, and she has never run the defragging program as far as I can tell, nor done a system cleanup. So I decided to defragment it, left it defragmenting overnight, and it is still only partway done. It will work on it for a short while, then a message comes up that says "new drive information: restarting" or something similar, and it has to go through the whole reading-the-driver thing again, working through already-defragged areas, then each time only defragging a few more lines before starting the process over. I've got it paused right now.

Things I have done to try to make it go faster and not restart:
stopped norton utilities from running in the background
shut off the screen saver
shut off the monitor's (and anything else's) idle auto-shut-off
deleted cookies and any spyware I found (i.e. ran the disk cleanup thing)
I even unplugged the phone cord (we are on dialup) even though I know that should do nothing.

Anyway, I'm an idiot about these things, and if anything else is running in the background, and updating the files every few minutes to cause this restarting, I don't know how to find it. And I don't want the total defragging to take, like, DAYS at this rate. So, help please?

boot into dos

then what

or fuck it... hit f8 when starting up and try safemode...?

I used to have a w98 computer and it never defragged properly - did exactly the same as you describe. Never did work it out. I know that's no use to you but it might be a regular bug.

kyle, this is just a shot in the dark but I've noticed this happening from time to time, and it wasn't what I thought it was.

If you have tons of directories/files, go to the directory you're losing the files/directories in, choose the "view" option from the menu bar on top of the window, go to "arrange icons by..." and then choose "name". I'm willing to bet if the directory is there, it's just not in the right alphabetical location, or is maybe off to the side of the window or something. It seems like a stupid answer to the question, but I've been burned by this multiple times.

As for the Win98 defragging issue, beanz OTM: the Win98 defragger fucking sucks, because if anything is running in the background at all, it messes with the defrag. Give up before you tear your hair out.

sean, no, I've done all that, they just aren't there. or they are there, they just aren't showing up. I started running checkdisk on it this morning and it found a lot of weird "missing" files; it's a 200GB drive though so it was going to take a while, so I just left it running and came to work. maybe when I get home I'll have some idea what the hell was up with it.

your computer has a good sense of humor!

Oh, oh, wait, 200GB drive? How is it connected to your system? And is it connected as a single partition, or is it set up in smaller partitions?

If you're connecting it to your system with an IDE cable straight to the motherboard, you may be running into an issue with the system not seeing all of the files, if you've gone over about 137 gigabytes...sometimes the controller on the motherboard isn't set up for drives over that size. After that amount of data, performance might get flaky. (If the drive is pre-formatted before you put it into the system, Windows will probably report 200GB but may not know what to do with the last 63 or so gigs, reliably, when it's writing to the drive.)

If it's a serial ATA drive or an external drive, this doesn't apply.

(I should note that many new systems have mobo connectors that can handle the larger drives. I'm just noting this, if you added the drive yourself to an older system.)

thanks for the words of wisdom y'all. I don't mind letting it run and take its sweet time, but if my mom bugs me about it again I may tear my hair out, at which point I'll give up.

sgs: you have to make sure that absolutely *nothing* else is running at the same time as defragmentation. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to get a list of running tasks and shut down as much as you can without killing the system entirely.

(if it automatically starts things like, say, Find Fast at startup, that will wreck your chances of defragmenting successfully. Check the Startup folder on the Start menu to see some of the things that are being started automatically and aren't necessarily visible on screen)

now,

I have a SMART failure thing detection thing on my hard disc, after the BIOS screen, before windows begins to start up.

I was backing-up everything to reformat the drive and reinstall windows, anyway. I did so, hoping the detection thing would just go away but it has not.

is a failure inevitable? is there no way to fix/stop it? should I just replace the disc straight away? the only reason I have not already got a new disc is that it is a laptop and a new 80Gb drive will be almost £100.

thanks.

Could be a year could be tommorow, get Everest Home

http://www.lavalys.com/products.php?lang=en

That will give you SMART information, is your laptop still in warranty?

but 1st off make sure any irreplacable docs are backed up ASAP.

installed that, it says--

05 / Reallocated Sector Count / 50 / 1 / 1 / 1022 / Pre-Failure: Imminent loss of data is being predicted

any idea what this means?

I have everything backed-up to an external disc and, also, to DVDs.

it is just under a year into its two year warranty.

problem is...I have a ton of work, at the moment and up until june, and cannot risk sudden problems or waiting for "repairs". I wish I could just buy a new disc and they would compensate me.

thank you.

Heavens! reallocated sectors are critical they're the modern equivalent of "bad blocks" if this means anything to you, you should replace the disk, as soon as possible.

Depending on your warranty type they will probably want the whole laptop back, and if you replace the disk yourself you could invalidate your current warranty in someway (breaking a sticker or something)

Give them a call and ask them what the warranty procedure involves for a knackered HDD.

: (

I have had the warning for about four or five days, now, but it is still running fine, at the moment.

I had hoped there would be a way to just format and completely and reset any probs.

oh, well!

thanks, again.

If the bad blocks are increasing eventually the disk will become unusable.

It's a good idea to get it sorted whilst the laptop is in the warranty period.

yeah...

I cannot afford to send it away, for repairs, though.

How big is the current disk? How much space is used?

I have an 80Gb drive, in my laptop.

I have, just recently, formatted and reinstalled windows--the only space used is by windows and a couple of applications and drivers--I have no files on it, now.

so, say, less than 3Gb used.

Earlier this morning, I scanned a document and converted it into a .doc file on a Mac, but now that I'm looking at it on my PC, there are these empty box characters peppered throughout the document now. In fact, every line after the first word, instead of a space separating the first two words, there's this box. And I've checked all the Word entities for special characters (like ^p and ^l), and this box is none of them. How can I get rid of these things automatically, without manually going through each one?

And I can't copy/paste this box to do a replace all.

can you save it as plain text, then re-open it? bit drastic, but should work ...

Ah yes, thanks. I actually saved it as html so that most of the formatting was retained. Ta for the idea!

I posted a problem I had on another thread but it's a bit different now. I'd installed the master drive from my old PC by mistake, NOW I have the correct drive added as a slave to the pre-installed master but a drive letter has not been assigned to this second HD in Windows. I am using GetDataBack to try and recover the data from the drive, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas why Windows couldn't assign a drive letter despite the Device Manager saying the drive was working fine.

is it partitioned and formatted?

You're on XP, right? Try opening Disk Manager to see if that can recognise it at all; and, if it can, to assign a drive letter to it.

(go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management - Disk Manager is in the tree under the Storage node)

It's not partitioned (afaik) or formatted. I'll try your suggestion tonight thanks Caitlin.

It must be both partitioned (even if it only has a single partition) and formatted if it already has data on it. Whatever you try, do *not* repartition or reformat, because this will delete all your data.

(unless you use a non-destructive partitioning program like Partition Magic, of course)

I tried UI Tweak but it didn't pick up on the second drive either. As it stands, my DVD ROM is D and the external Maxtor HD I have is E. So I'm hoping I can assign G to the slave drive and then USB devices (Archos jukebox) after that.

Does it show up in disk management?

Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management

If it does, you should be able to assign a drive letter to it here. I don't follow why you would need to use a special program to recover data from the disk... It should still be there.

This is assuming some form of NT of course...

I'm looking for a quick and easy way of doing the following in the terminal window:

I need to compare two folders and delete from the first folder everything that also exists in the second folder. I can't find a flag in rsync for doing this it's not really what it's for. Any ideas anyone?

when you say 'also exists' do you mean 'is the same as' or 'has the same name as'?

cd to second folder
find . -printf "rm -i /firstfolder/%P\n"

pipe this to a file then run the file (can do this in one go but i always check the output just in case). will delete everything in first folder that has the same name as that in the second folder

might wann stick a -type f in there as well or it'll try and delete directories too (and fail)

ls folder1 > f1
ls folder2 > f2
comm -1 -2 f1 f2

will give you a list of common(ly named) files

perfect, thanks

Steve, the only thought that comes to mind is that the second disk you've just added as a slave isn't in the right format. Could you confirm what operating system you had on it and what operating system you're currently using?

another (slight) possibility is that the other ide locations (ie primary slave, secondary slave) aren't set to 'auto' in the bios but are disabled for some reason.

in any case, i would recommend getting into the bios settings at bootup and see if the computer sees the drive on that level, before even getting into windows

also are the jumpers on the drives set correctly for their positions on the ide channels? (is the slave drive set to slave or auto)

another quick question. Using rsync is it possible to have rsync synchronise files across a series of directories into one directory without recreating the directory structure in the recipient directory.

I think you'd have to build a list of directories using find then call rsync once for each source directory.

OK. How do I turn a list of commands into a shell script? this is something I'm going to need to do regularly is there a good website on this sort of thing?

Well, the straightforward way is to:

1) write the list of commands in a file
2) put this at the top:

#!/bin/bash

or, more generically, "#!" followed by the path to the shell you want to use.

don't know anything about rsync that man rsync wouldn't tell you. but couldn't you run rsync for each of the source directories with the same destination directory? (do you really want to do this? you're effectively throwing location information away)

(-d stops rsync recursing)

xpost

> How do I turn a list of commands into a shell script?

you don't need to, really. just

sh file_full_of_commands

btw chmod +x file_full_of_commands makes it executable