KrAzY Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 2ND TIME, Cannot Delete one particular file... Says "In Use..." Well This is the second time I cannot delete a file. The first instance was an extractable .exe. Out of all the files I couldn't get rid of one of them. This time is was a File Download off of Morpheus and when I changed the file extension from .dat to .mpg... everything went fine except Media Player couldn't play it. Which I understand... . so I went to rename it with it's .dat extension and it wouldn'd let me, "File in use....". I have restarted... stopped/closed/uninstalled Morphues and with each attempt I cannot delete the file. I have ran chkdsk against all drives and still the file exists. Any help would be appreciated!! KrAzY Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keldyn Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 Hmmm... odd, have you tried deleting it from within safe mode ? :ermm: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KrAzY Posted February 15, 2002 Author Share Posted February 15, 2002 Yes.. tried in both case and no luck.......(safe mode that is) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KrAzY Posted February 15, 2002 Author Share Posted February 15, 2002 Another... "Anomily"... When I try to delete/access/move that file (the .dat / file downloaded from Morpheus) explorer.exe hogs the CPU 95-99% and it grows to 40MB to 60MB..... My system dies. The only way to recover instead of rebooting is to kill (end process) on explorer.exe and then restart explorer.exe! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L3onheart Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 Use Windows Explorer to delete the file instead of using the "My Computer" "My Documents". Windows XP has a built-in preview feature, and when you have a corrupted/incomplete video (specially DivX) it'll look for the index of the file throught out the ENTIRE file. Either use Windows Explorer to delete it or wait until XP stops reading the whole file (the bigger the file, the longer it'll take to stop). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 Recovery Console :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mariusu Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 how big is that file after all?:ermm: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sleeper Veteran Posted February 15, 2002 Veteran Share Posted February 15, 2002 sometimes in XP i get files that i cannot delete until after 3/4 reboots..... weird :s Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mariusu Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 i think this is the file protection system microsoft introduced first in win 2000. but i'm not sure:ermm: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MxxCon Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 close all explorers and open dos window and rename it from there Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest deadzombie Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 Command prompt delete may not always work... Another, faster way to delete those locked up files... 1.)After you try opening a video with WMP or the Playa 99% of the time if the movie crashes the file is still in use...try to open the movie with Quicktime. Even if Quicktime won't play the movie, you'll always be able to delete it afterwards. Quicktime doesn't 'hold on' to the file when it's finished with it. Then you are free to delete. 2.) Always make sure that whatever P2P client you used to originally download the file has its que cleared and is properly shut down (also make certain none is trying to download the file from you!). Alot of auto resume features access a file, especially if you download it from more than one source. You see the download as finished, your auto resume on the P2P still has its grubby claws into the file. I don't know why this works, or the specifics of what is referencing what, but I can tell you from experience that this works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
.KICK Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 yep, that is the case for mew, someone is either downloading it..........so u can't delete it but just get rid of them.......;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KrAzY Posted February 15, 2002 Author Share Posted February 15, 2002 Well it wasn't anyone download it from me... I made sure Morpheus was closed. I also rebooted to make sure morpheus completely closed down. This is how I was able to change the extention to something else like .mpg cause it wasn't in use by anything. Although it wouldn't delete after playing... I rebooted after that to make sure nothing was holding on to it and same thing. Today though i opened a command prompt and deleted and everything it ok. Wonder why that worked.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
khaos34 Posted February 15, 2002 Share Posted February 15, 2002 it probably worked becasue u deleted it without accessing it first from windows explorer... that's how i always do it. i hate waiting for XP to try and preview a file when i click on it... and what you might have had is an AVI file, not an MPG... the indexes of mpg files are not troublesome as with AVI files... you may watch an incomplete mpg with no trouble, but with avi files, you wll have to rebuild the index or wait until you have the whole file... that's why people complain that they can't preview AVI files in morpheus/kazaa/grokster what i'm guessin is that since you gave the file the "identity" of a video file (although it might not have been mpg, windows still sees it as a video file because of the extension), it tried to preview it and like what was said in an earlier post, searches for the index throughout the entire file... so if you use the command prompt, you can delete it easily since it doesn't try to preview the video. there ya go =p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
othernutrient Posted February 18, 2002 Share Posted February 18, 2002 The reason explorer.exe takes up all your processing time is because the file is heavily fragmented and Windows is attempting to get all the information from the file when you click on it, even once. Since Windows is accessing the file, you cannot delete it. I would imagine you were downloading multiple files while downloading this DAT file. If you run disk defragmenter, you will likely see that this file has several thousand fragments. To test, open Explorer and click on a file while looking at the status bar. You will notice that after a very brief moment, information about the file appears in the status bar. Now click on the DAT file, and notice that no information appears. It is because Windows is attempting to read through the file to get the information it needs from it to determine what type of file it is and what its file-specific attributes are, such as framerate, length, bitrate, etc. The file, being heavily fragmented, takes a long time to be processed. You have the option of logging off and logging back on, killing explorer.exe and restarting it, or doing a complete reboot; all will work. I would suggest then that you open a command window and rename or delete the file that way: ren file.ext new.ext or del file.ext. I would recommend either burning the file to a CD then defragmenting the drive, or moving the file to a different partition and defragmenting the drive. Either way, once the file is off of that partition (and onto another medium so the file itself is not as heavily fragmented) you will be able to open/view/delete/etc. the file to your heart's content through Windows Explorer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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