directory troubles

[Larry Hall (Cygwin)]

On 3/25/2014 12:49 PM, Richard wrote:
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> ...I have for more than ten years used links in specific directories as a
> strategy of managing disk space, distinguishing between remote (NFS / Samba)
> from local, and I've applied the same strategy to help in keeping my linux
> and Cygwin installations as similar as possible. Now, something has gone
> wrong on one system and I'm perplexed - I'm pretty darned sure it was
> working "last time I checked!"
>
> Consider /d for local disk mounts, /nfs for remote disk mounts and /l for
> "local use" which links into trees wherever. In this case, /d and /l were
> broken, but the nfs directory and its mounts seem to be unaffected.
>
> This morning I went to /opt which ordinarily translates to /l/opt (which
> itself translates to /d/c/opt or /d/b/opt), but Cygwin's Bash shell wouldn't
> go there. I got:
>
> -bash: cd: /opt: No such file or directory
>
> Investigating, ls showed the directories /d and /l, but I couldn't cd into
> them. ls -l showed simply:
>
> ls: cannot access d: No such file or directory
> ls: cannot access l: No such file or directory
> d??????????  ? ?       ?                   ?            ? d
> d??????????  ? ?       ?                   ?            ? l
>
> Since these directories only contain links, I decided to remove them and
> make them anew. Oops! That didn't work! When Cygwin decided it wasn't going
> to delete them, I first tried a cmd window, but it complained the
> directories weren't empty. When I "got inside" them, I found only . and ..
> as subdirectories - again, as reported by cmd. There was no removing those,
> either. So, I used an Explorer window. It permitted me to see the link names
> - all looked good - and it worked at deleting them - at least, they no
> longer show up from either Windows or Cygwin tools.
>
> But when I try and recreate them, I get:
>
> mkdir: cannot create directory `d': No such file or directory
> mkdir: cannot create directory `l': No such file or directory
>
> -frown- Not sure what to do next, I tried creating them from the same
> Windows explorer window I used to delete them, but it says, "Unable to
> create the folder 'New Folder' Access is denied."
>
> This is on "corporate edition XP 64 bit" - I am the administrator but there
> is a different "Administrator" account for which I don't know the password
> (never remember even setting the administrator password from the first
> installation)! On this version there isn't a "run as administrator", only a
> "run as", and since I don't know the password, I can't use the administrator
> account directly unless I figure out how to deal with the password. I also
> have tried (of course) unchecking the box about limiting privileges, but
> that didn't help either.
>
> Normally I'd just ignore this and work around it somehow, but these
> directories are pretty critical to the whole file system management
> strategy, so it'd be nice to not have to reinstall everything - reinstalling
> cygwin is among the most painful processes I can imagine as it virtually
> never works right the first time out and is possibly a multi-day process.
> Beyond that, any and all insights on where I went wrong, etc, etc, are very
> much appreciated.

I'd recommend first rebooting and, if that doesn't solve it, do a chkdsk.


-- 
Larry

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