• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

most aggrivating windows bug

C

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
I've never seen this bug acknowledged elsewhere, but it's occurred several times while I have used various computers.

The bug is that while moving a large folder with multiple files and subfolders (I'm not sure what the exact trigger is, but this seems to cause the bug to occur most often) over a network from one computer to another sometimes part of the copy is DUMPED to the root of your C:\ drive, instead of putting it on the proper destination computer and folder.

It's really mind boggling to me that such a bug could exist for so long, it occurs in all versions of windows 2000 and XP. I haven't had it happen on Vista yet but I wouldn't completely rule it out because I just don't work with Vista enough at work.

As a specific example, I was moving a user's personal folder from one network drive to another. The user had previously backed up the majority of her local computer's drive onto her user folder, so it was about 20GB full of a mix of important files and misc trash like temporary internet files, windows files, installed programs, etc. Began moving the files over to the new location, copy started normal, and periodically failed- stuff like "can not move file blah blah blah the name is too long", when this occurred I'd manually restart the file move and have it rename the files that are too long. Anyway this took several attempts to fully copy the folder, and what do I see now? I see about 100 misc random trash files and folders on the root of our file server, that were originally in this user's folder.


Anyone else seen this before? This has happened in the past, but I can't really say how to prevent it. I suppose if I moved files one at a time this wouldn't happen, but that isn't realistic for these sort of large folders. It's just such a serious and huge bug that I can't believe Microsoft has ignored it for the last 8 years.
 
I don't know what's up with the "trash files" on the root directory. But I use Microsoft's free RoboCopy program to copy large numbers of files that might have "illegally long" paths/names. It'll copy them. And if there's any hard drive damage, you can tell RoboCopy to ignore it and go onto the next file, and to write a log file of errors it found.
 
I have ran into issues with corrupt files and long name\path issues before, but I have never seen junk files accumulate in the root before.

Do you always open the destination folder and then paste the files or do you normally highlight and then paste? If its the later there is a chance you missed highlighting the folder and thus moved the files to the root maybe? To me that seems more likely, given the untold amount of data that is copied\moved on windows systems around the world everyday I'd expect to have heard of it before if it was a common occurrence.
 
UNC path limits are 260 characters.

Unfortunately you get users that like to name their documents and directories with very descriptive names, so depending on how nested those directories are, you may run into those errors.

Use robocopy to deal with those files like RebateMonger suggested.
 
Originally posted by: TheKub
I have ran into issues with corrupt files and long name\path issues before, but I have never seen junk files accumulate in the root before.

Do you always open the destination folder and then paste the files or do you normally highlight and then paste? If its the later there is a chance you missed highlighting the folder and thus moved the files to the root maybe? To me that seems more likely, given the untold amount of data that is copied\moved on windows systems around the world everyday I'd expect to have heard of it before if it was a common occurrence.
Click to expand...

What you are suggesting is impossible because I never drag individual files, I just drag the user folder which contains all the subfolders. If I accidentally dragged it to root, there would just be the user folder on the root and all the junk files would be under it. Instead I see random junk files all over the C:\ root.

The process is I right click the user folder "bob" and drag it into the destination folder "share" which is mapped from another server. Then the little menu opens with Copy Here, Move Here, Create Shortcut Here etc. I pick "Move Here". I can't really say exactly what causes the junk files to be dumped into the root beyond that, I do know *most* of the time the files will move just fine. The file dumping seems to happen most often when I am moving a very large folder full of files and the move is interrupted due to some file names being too long after the move.
 
I've noticed errors in XP SP2, when copying a large number of files off of a USB flash drive (formatted FAT32), onto a disk (formatted NTFS).

Sometimes it gives a warning copying a file, warning that the file already exists. Choosing not to copy that file, causes one of the other files on the source not to get copied to the destination.

In short, Windows' is screwing up the copy process, and is somehow thinking that it is copying the same file twice, while skipping a different file. This has happened to me multiple times, and it's quite annoying.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top