Folder shown in Everything cannot be accessed

Discussion related to "Everything" 1.5 Alpha.
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kazzybash
Posts: 98
Joined: Mon Mar 02, 2020 9:55 pm

Folder shown in Everything cannot be accessed

Post by kazzybash »

Hi,
not sure if I should be posting this question here (as it may not be an Everything-related phenomenon), but let's see. It can then be kicked in the off topic subforum, obviously.

Got a NTFS formatted disk. A folder is shown in Everything that cannot be accessed (File Explorer and/or CMD) or removed. The folder is empty. After a database rebuild the folder is still there. Ran chkdsk /r /f for a check, but no errors.

Is there a way to determine at a lower level how/why Everything reports the folder to be there while Windows says it is not? Is there another way to determine the status of this folder?

regards, Kazzy
NotNull
Posts: 5261
Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 9:22 pm

Re: Folder shown in Everything cannot be accessed

Post by NotNull »

Everything sees all files and folders thanks to the low-level that it sees the filesystem.
Some of these folders are not accessible as a regular user, for example the C:\users\<username> folders of other users or some Windows folders like C:\Windows\System32\config\, C:\Windows\SystemTemp\ and hundreds of others.
Some other files and folders are not visible/accessible in Explorer due to security settings

So first guess is that the folder actually does exist, but is inaccessible as a regular user.
Maybe it shows up in an elevated CMD?

EDIT:
Another possibility is that Explorer is configured to not show hidden files.
Enable the Attributes column in Everything to see which attributes this folder has. H (Hidden) and S (System) could indicate a reason why the folder dioes not show up in Explorer.


To help zoom in on the issue: what is the full path of this folder as shown in Everything?
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