Can't delete files and directories 1

[rmiller11]

I opened up a directory for a day with FTP services. And, over night someone put files on there with directories for sharing. I can not delete those directoies and files. They seem to have spaces in them and probably have high asci characters that can not be seen. how do I delete them? Any utilities out there that can be used? Have tired everything I know of at this point.

 

[TimCHTECH]

Are you logged on to the machine as a local or domain administrator? If you are, you should be able to take ownership of the files and delete them.

If that doesn't work, is there a certain error message you are getting when you attempt to delete the files and folders?

 

[rmiller11]

I am the owner. It says, Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk. And: Cannot remove folder prn75:Cannot find the specified file.

I had this problem years ago in dos and can't remember how eventually got rid of them... I believe there are high asci codes in the file names that can not be seen. Some directories have spaces before the names. ie: x:\ prn75, there are other directores that sho nothing in the name, only have spaces. And still others that appear to have no spaces that can not be deleted either. I don't know what they used to make them but it was done so that they could not be deleted by conventional means.

 

[kmcferrin]

Well, you could try going from the command line and see if deltree works still. Barring that, connect via FTP yourself and try rmdir, since they were probably created with mkdir. Probably anything that you use a wildcard to delete with instead of a specific filename would work.

Not that it makes any difference now, but you should never allow anonymous FTP users write access to your system (or anonymous access at all, if you can avoid it). My web/ftp/smtp server at home gets hit usually 20-30 times a day with anonymous FTP login attempts, usually from only a handful of systems, presumably automated.

 

[sseaner]

I also cannot delete these files. Some of the folders do not even have names associated with them. I tried to rename them but you get the same message, "Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk". Any ideas on how I can delete them?

Thanks

 

[rmiller11]

I have not found a solution yet other then reformatting the Hard Drive. If you find one, please let me know. I know ther is a utility or a way out there some where, just haven't found it yet. The problem is, how much time and money do you spend in researching this? Currently I disabled the FTP so it is no longer available for this to happen again and cleaned out as much as it would allow me to delete.

 

[BuckWeet]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;811176

follow that


Type RmDir \\.\ path\ftproot\folder_name /s at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.

For example, if your FTP root folder is in the default location in the C:\Inetpub folder, and the damaged FTP file structure is in a folder named "Test", type the following command, and then press ENTER:
RmDir \\.\ C:\Inetpub\ftproot\Test /s



Thats probably what you'll need to do..


BuckWeet