I’m having trouble renaming, moving or deleting some files on my hard drive, and get messages like ‘file is corrupt or busy’, or something like that. I would like to do a cleanup to fix this problem. 12 years ago I used to use Norton Disk Doctor to scan the whole disk and fix stuff like that. Before running out and buying a new copy, though, I thought I’d ask you more up-to-date tecchies if there’s any good freeware or shareware that can do this, or if there’s any payware you’d recommend above NDD at this point. I’m using Windows 2002 or something like that, not a Mac.
If you have filesystem problems, there’s no need to buy something to fix it. Click on Start and My Computer, right click on the C: drive (unless the file is on a different drive), select Properties, click on the Tools tab and select “Error Checking”. Select the box that says automatically fix file system errors. (The other option to scan for bad sectors will scan every single byte on the partition and will take a long as long as a few hours. The file system check will take only a few minutes.) If it’s the C: drive it will tell you it can’t do it but can schedule it for the next reboot. Select yes, then reboot. When you are booting it will give you a message that a disk check was schedule and press any key to skip. DO NOT PRESS ANY KEY. It’ll go through and check things, fix any problems and then reboot again.
That’ll eliminate corruption as a problem. The next issue is whether the file really is in use. It would help to know what kind of file this is to give specific advice, but check to make sure nothing is running that would be related to that file. There’s also a bug with video files where the thumbnail generation will hang if the file has errors in it, preventing its deletion. You can try renaming the file to a different file type and then deleting it.
If all else fails, download KillBox and use its ‘Delete On Reboot’ option. It’ll schedule a job to delete files the next time you reboot before anything is running that would lock the file.
