Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Cannot Delete Folder/File - Cannot Read From Source File Or Disk

I had to get in the way-back machine today.

We have a windows 2003 server (I know...) where we are moving some files around.

One of the folders would not allow us to delete it, giving the good old error:

"Cannot Delete Folder:  Cannot Read From Source File Or Disk"

We used to see this sort of thing all the time back "in the day" but I figured I should put this down for future generations of computer archaeologists.  (and perhaps anyone who gets burned by misbehaving file names)

the "fix"

get a command prompt, and navigate to the folder that holds the "undeletable" folder/file

issue the following command:

dir /x

this will show you the contents of the folder, including the 8.03 dos name of the file  (it is shorter, and generally has a ~ in the name)

then simply issue the command DEL with the 8.03 filename, and viola, it should be gone.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

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Unknown said...

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