Dear Windows: fsck you!
About a week ago, I tried to copy my music collection onto my MP3 jukebox again. Sadly, the jukebox does not draw power from the USB connection. The power cord lost its connection, the batteries ran down, and the drive got a little corrupted. This led to an unfortunate problem. Windows wouldn't let me delete the problem directory wasn't empty. It also wouldn't let me delete the files in the directory. I couldn't even delete the directory above the parent directory, because that would require recursing in and deleting the files first.
Sigh. OK, I tried reformatting the disk. To my chagrin, the GUI tool would only let me format it as NTFS. The MP3 player can only understand FAT32. I went to the command line tool and tried to use it. It spent about an hour examining the disk before realizing that it was too large for a FAT32 partition. Argh! Hoping that the problem was just in the file system, I tried to use the disk repair thing. It would only scan the disk at startup, but never seemed to mount the drive before getting past the check for disks to scan. Argh!
I took the jukebox to work and plugged it into my Linux machine. There, I was able to use dosfsck. Kindly folks that they are, somebody in the open source community had adapted the classic File System ChecK tool to work with Windows-formatted drives. After a few attempts at the correct command line options, dosfsck managed to fix the problem with the bad directories, and I was able to blow away the whole thing. Yay, Linux!
So I brought the jukebox home, and hooked the power cable up in a more stable position. NOW, Windows detected the drive on startup and ran checkdisk. Thanks, Windows! Great timing! This time, the copy worked. Whew!
Sigh. OK, I tried reformatting the disk. To my chagrin, the GUI tool would only let me format it as NTFS. The MP3 player can only understand FAT32. I went to the command line tool and tried to use it. It spent about an hour examining the disk before realizing that it was too large for a FAT32 partition. Argh! Hoping that the problem was just in the file system, I tried to use the disk repair thing. It would only scan the disk at startup, but never seemed to mount the drive before getting past the check for disks to scan. Argh!
I took the jukebox to work and plugged it into my Linux machine. There, I was able to use dosfsck. Kindly folks that they are, somebody in the open source community had adapted the classic File System ChecK tool to work with Windows-formatted drives. After a few attempts at the correct command line options, dosfsck managed to fix the problem with the bad directories, and I was able to blow away the whole thing. Yay, Linux!
So I brought the jukebox home, and hooked the power cable up in a more stable position. NOW, Windows detected the drive on startup and ran checkdisk. Thanks, Windows! Great timing! This time, the copy worked. Whew!