Anyone who has to use Windows and suffers this, PowerToys is your friend. Locksmith identifies what's locking your file and allows you to free it up. Dunno why PowerToys isn't bundled by default tbh.
Dunno why PowerToys isn't bundled by default tbh.
PowerToys give the user more power, which goes directly against Microsoft's own goal.
Also, less seriously, "toys" implies the user might enjoy the experience, and you know they can't let that happen.
Cause they’re too busy finding new ways to bundle ads.
Also please pre-install the sysinternals suite, thanks
Psexec can be pretty dangerous. Psexec.exe -i -s gives you access to the NTAUTHORITY/SYSTEM account, which is higher than Administrator. One time at work I was trying to do something and was getting permission denied so I decided to use that to get around the problem, I got to spend the afternoon talking to our security administrator because he got a bunch of alerts from our antivirus.
Well that was the mistake. The first thing you do with SYSTEM is disable the security software.
There's a list of locked files under shares in computer management
Sorry, but disk erasure is not available in the trial version of Disk© Partition® Wizard™ 2002. To use this feature, please upgrade to Disk© Partition® Wizard™ Pro 2002 for just $49.99 at Whythefuckdoievenneedthis.co.uk/shop
Nowadays it would be $19.99 per month and it's a one year contract that renews three months before expiration.
My first attempt at running Arch, I managed to fuck it up so badly that I had to write a script to write zeros to every bit of my HDD. Fun times.
Wtf did you do lol I’m scared
Honestly don't even remember, but it was in my peak "know enough to be dangerous" days in college. I almost certainly didn't have to go that nuclear to fix it, but that's what I did.
Take 2 of Arch, after that wipe was completed, went pretty well. It revived an old piece of shit laptop for another few years before its motherboard gave out.
I’ll wager guess it was something to do with confusing GPT and MBR partitioning. There was a time where some BIOSs and loaders only understood or preferred one over the other, leading to weird incongruences depending on what you’re using to look at the disk. You have to actually overwrite the partition tables to get a clean start.
"oh you want to delete your entire root directory lol go right ahead"
I think it asks "Are you sure?" now first.
Not if you indicate you are sure in advance
‘rm -rf /*’ for the win. I was on a production system when I learned I used that combo far too much. Thankfully, lots were deleted and my crimes were never detected.
Inodes can be kept active by unlinked filehandles, a fun way to spend a afternoon figuring out where all the space went.
Meanwhile chromeOS had a stroke because I asked to set a wallpaper
ChromeOS is so funny because it's either way too anal about what you can do or there's a part they forgot to harden against end users and the power of linux spews forth with endless destructive potential
Windows, too. Turns out, there's a hard-coded image size limit. If you've got a ~5k screen or bigger, or equivalent size virtual desktop with multiple monitors - you gotta find a way to compress it below limit. Nope, webp is not accepted, even though it is perfectly capable of using it.
Windows: Noooo, You can't delete and merge this partition!!!1!!!!1!
Linux:
Had a call to sort an issue where someone couldn't open an excel file because they already had it open don't know why that needed a warning over a simple window switch to the sheet they wanted but hey stopped me doing what I was doing for nothing
Yeah, needing to use Microsoft Office for everything at work is a damn pain. This one time I am trying to close Word, but then I must have clicked the top right X one too many times so the "You can't close Word until the Closing... dialog is dismissed" dialog pops up, which itself interrupts the Closing dialog...
Screen photo
You also can't open two spreadsheets that have the same filename. I'm sure that's led to a helpdesk call or two.
I lost a lot of respect for Microsoft when I first saw that issue. It's such an easy to avoid limitation. Like probably a similar level of difficulty to remove that limitation than to write the error message explaining it, unless it's more of a spaghetti mess than I'm expecting it to be.
"Hello, yes, IT department? I think my co-worker's keyboard is missing all their punctuation marks. Yes, it's making communication very difficult."
There was a point not so long ago where Adobe Collaboration Sync got so bad on my Windows 10 box it wouldn't let me close any pdfs that were open. "File in use" error, even if all Adobe programs were closed except for that pdf. I'd have to go into Task Manager and manually kill it. Between that and Adobe Updater I couldn't get rid of it by any known means, and it was choking the shit out of my machine.
I'm transitioning to Linux but not there yet, still need the Windows box for now, so I had to do something. But I'm old school, so it was a DOS batch file to the rescue. I call it "kiladobe.bat":
taskkill /f /im armsvc.exe
del "C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\armsvc.exe"
taskkill /f /im AdobeCollabSync.exe
del "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\AdobeCollabSync.exe"
It's now a scheduled task in taskschd.msc. I put kiladobe.bat in the main Adobe program folder (heh) and run that task as administrator at startup and every four hours or so, give or take an hour.
No more problems.
Now, all that remains is that every so often I see the command window flash up for a split second because this batch file is killing Adobe shit, and it just makes me smile. (I could probably make it stop flashing up the CLI, but I genuinely enjoy the reminder of how I'm fucking Adobe's virus-like install and lock endeavors up the ass.)
EDITED TO ADD a simple "@echo off" by itself as the first line would probably turn off any appearance of the CLI, if anyone wants to use this text for their own batch file. If that didn't work I'd probably throw a space and a ">nul" at the end of each line to grab the output and throw it into neverneverland.
VLC: Sure, just move the podcast you're listening to in another directory while listening.
Rsync zeroing 🚬😭🚬😭🚬😭
The Tux reminds me of playing Super Tux Kart today... I really hate that GIMP mascot now,
This is funny, because copying files to a USB flashdrive, is just inherently disfunctional in linux.
TRUE!!! Why "user friendly" distros does not mount removable drives with sync option by default is beyond me.
Hang on there is a sync option? Does that make the progressbar work? If so why is it not enabled?
Yep. Almost all operating systems have a bufor that tell programs file was moved when it is still in the process. It makes perfect sense, it speed things up and extends the lifespan of the device.
You can flush that bufor manually with just the sync command or disable it for whole partition with -o sync option. Technically you should unmount drives before unplugging for safety anyway, but people are stupid or more important lazy and in my opinion for external devices mounting with sync really should be the default. Maybe some low-level developer would disagree.
Many many years ago, it's one of the things that made me switch to Linux. Moving and renaming files while using them was kind of a game changer.
Hint: :q!
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