Can't delete a file, please help!

[eLiu]

Hey folks,
Trying to help my female friend fix her computer.

This is what happened:
She's on the beta testing team for the newest version of MS Office. She has a Toshiba tabletPC and uses it to take notes in class.

This morning, OneNote crashed on her and would not restart, destroying the directory she was working in.

We haven't been able to reinstall onenote; we believe this is b/c there's a corrupted file sitting around in /Local Settings/Application Data/Microsoft/OneNote. It's ~500MB, which is way too large.

When we try to delete, we get this:
"Cannot delete OneNoteOfflineCache: The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable."

I've tried running chkdsk /f /r but it won't start up when we reboot the machine...that baffles me.

I've also tried quarantining it using NortonAV & then deleting, but that didn't work either (couldn't quarantine).

I wanted to try deleting from DOS, but I can only find *recovery* tools, not deletion tools! doh.

I've also tried some cmdline "secure removal" tools for XP in the hopes that they could work around this, but no luck there either.


Anyway, I'm || close from reformatting it. Do you guys have any suggestions?

Thanks,
-Eric

 

[Jiggz]

Go back to the recovery tools in XP and use Fixmbr and fix boot. You can also ran chkdsk from the recovery console. And if still doesn't want to boot, try the repair installation first before reformatting. If it still won't work, then it's time to reformat.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, If you are getting into REAL DOS then type DEL /?. You will get detailed instruction on how to del a file. It's pretty primative, but effective. Attrib /? will get you the instructs for removing the READONLY and HIDDEN etc. attributes. You can do the same thing from WINDOZ by right clicking the file and left clicking PROPERTIES. READONLY keeps you from deleteing (USUALLY!). Good Luckl, Jim

 

[eLiu]

Jiggz,
Chkdsk didn't fix it from the recovery console. Fixmbr did not occur to me.

But it's too late now b/c she needed the machine back up, so I restored an image.

JimPhelpsMI, DOS can't read NTFS by default. And all the software I found to mate DOS to NTFS woudln't let me delete files...since recovering files is a much more common desire, haha.

 

[Jiggz]

Sometimes what happens when you have a crash, the FAT or file allocation tables get corrupted including the MBR which prevents you from booting. It's not a fix all solution to do the FIXMBR or FIXBOOT but most of the times, it does fix the problem. And if I still cannot fix it, I always try the repair installation first before reformat. But since you are under time constraint, well, a restore image will do too except you lose data.