Repairing a damaged recycle bin

[weberm]

I have a Win98 machine with two hard drives. Recently, for some unknown reason, one thought a program had a perputual lock on its contents, forcing me to recover via a Norton Ghost image file. Anyhow, whenever I try to empty the recycle bin, I get a cryptic error message about "DD". If I open explorer and go to the Recycled folder I can delete them just fine, so I'm thinking my best bet is to "reinstall" the recycle bin from scratch. How does one go about doing that?

 

[azpctech01]

Have you tried running the system file checker?
start>run>sfc

You will need either the win98 cd available or the cabs in the option/cabs folder in the windows directory

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies."

 

[weberm]

I haven't tried the system file checker yet, but will try that tonight. Does SFC require the Win98 CD or CAB files?

 

[joe935]

You could also try deleting the recycle bin from the desktop and reboot windows will rebuild it.

 

[weberm]

Have you tried running the system file checker?
start>run>sfc

I tried your suggestion but got this error message:

System File Checker cannot check the following folder because the volume is locked: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\PRECOPY Close all programs and click retry...

For what it's worth, when I attempt to empty the recycling bin, I get this message but am able to delete the files without problems if I open it and manually delete them.

Error deleting file: Cannot delete DD1: Access is denied. Make sure disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Could recovering the drive via the Norton backup have scrambled something in the FAT? I noticed there are some zero-length files on that drive that ressist being deleted and some other oddities. Do you think these damaged files could be causing this problem?

 

[weberm]

You could also try deleting the recycle bin from the desktop and reboot windows will rebuild it.

Do you mean right-click on the bin and choose "delete" from the pop-up menu?

 

[weberm]

From the "better late than never" department, I finally fixed the problem this weekend! I wound up opening explorer and copying the C: drive folder to the D: drive one, overwriting it in the process and replacing it with a working version. I suspect the problem was caused by a hidden file with a munged name in the folder because I also spent the afternoon moving good files to the C: drive, rebooting in DOS and deleting them using wildcards in the line command.