On Tue, 11 Dec 2001 13:02:50 -0500, Samuel W. Heywood wrote: > Questions:
> Why doesn't the the DR-DOS "del" command work for deleting > an LFN from my hard drive on a different machine running > DR-DOS? I once had a working Windows 95 installation on > the different machine but now the machine has been fixed so > that it will now boot to DR-DOS. I booted from a DR-DOS > system floppy and ran "sys c:" to fix it. To fix it real > good I will have to delete all the LFNs that still remain > on the hard drive from the old Windows 95 installation. > The DR-DOS "del" command doesn't work for deleting the LFNs > on the hard drive. Why? > Even when I boot from a floppy with a WIN95 system disk, > even the WIN95 version of DOS will not delete the LFNs. Why? >From the point of view of DR-DOS (and also MS-DOS 6.2 and earlier), LFNs are just unknown type of garbage in directories. DOS doesn't know how to handle them. It doesn't know why and when it should delete LFNs. (In this strange way Microsoft implemented "backward compatibility" of LFNs: none of older DOSes touches them). So when you type DEL under DR-DOS, "standard" short filename (SFN) entries in the directories are deleted, but LFNs remain -- they become "orphanted LFNs" that lost their SFN counterparts. MS-DOS 7 deletes LFNs, but only _with_ corresponding SFNs. Therefore you should delete files with LFNs only under Windows/MS-DOS 7, otherwise you'll always get "orphanted LFNs". Orphanted LFNs can be fixed by Windows ScanDisk (I'm not sure if MS-DOS 7 ScanDisk can do it, and I can't verify it quickly now, as I'm using DR-DOS and no Windows s**tware here :-). Without MS ScanDisk, you have to use a hex disk editor, unfortunately. > Windows 95 seems to be just like a very bad virus that is > very hard to get rid of. But very easy to catch. New machines come usually already winfected. Greetings, Michal
