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{ 2005 09 12 }

Invisible Files

What do you do when you need the answer to a ques­tion and Google doesn’t deliver? Ask on the blog of course… I would really like to know the answer to this one, as it would save a large amount of irrit­a­tion and I assume oth­ers have the same prob­lem. I’ve spent hours bur­ied deep in search engine res­ults with no luck.

As befits a fam­ily with jobs in the com­puter industry, we have a few com­puters spread around the house, all con­nec­ted with a decent home net­work and pro­tec­ted with a good Linux-based fire­wall (which also serves this blog). The com­puters run a num­ber of oper­at­ing sys­tems — Win­dows 2000, Win­dows XP, Mac OS X, Sol­aris. The prob­lem only appears with the Win­dows XP boxes — or rather, between them. For some reason, one Win­dows XP box can’t see all the files and folders on the other Win­dows XP box, although they’re quite vis­ible from both Win­dows 2000 and OS X. The odd thing is that some files and folders are vis­ible, often some files in a given folder will be vis­ible but the oth­ers won’t, and to my eye there are no dif­fer­ences in secur­ity set­tings, own­er­ship, or ACLs. Mind you, I’m obvi­ously miss­ing some­thing some­where or I’d be able to see all those files from every machine in the house! I tried copy­ing some of the files to new dir­ect­or­ies; some­times that lets me see them across the net­work, and some­times it doesn’t. I have no idea what set­tings are being put in place to stop me look­ing at such dan­ger­ous files as .css and .html in par­tic­u­lar dir­ect­or­ies; the sys­tem seems capri­cious — as does any sys­tem when you haven’t figured out the rules by which it oper­ates. The innate abil­ity of the human brain to fig­ure out pat­terns has decidedly failed me in this instance.

Help would be much appre­ci­ated, not only for me but for the rest of the fam­ily who have to put up with my imprec­a­tions each time I want to trans­fer files from one box to the other, only to find that they’re not vis­ible from the box I want to trans­fer them to.

Posted by Lauren Wood on Monday, September 12, 2005, at 9:23 pm. Filed under Technology. You can post a comment, but trackbacks are closed.

{ 13 } Comments

  1. Nathan Nutter | Sep 12, 2005 at 10:52 pm | Permalink

    Win­dows Explorer should only hide two types of files, hid­den and sys­tem. You can choose to view either of these types in “Folder Options”. If it is not this and the secur­ity, etc. looks ok then I don’t know the answer.

  2. Parand Tony Darugar | Sep 13, 2005 at 12:24 am | Permalink

    Do you have it setup as a shared forlder? I’ve seen sim­ilar things on my home net­work. Not sure why it shows up, but I’ve found if I unshare the folder and then share it again everything shows up. Not really an answer…

  3. Bob DuCharme | Sep 13, 2005 at 7:20 am | Permalink

    Hi Lauren,

    I was strug­gling with the same prob­lem, and while I still can’t see files from one on the other, a post last Sat­urday by Bill de hÓra did solve my main prob­lem, which was how to copy a large num­ber of files between two XP machines: http://www.dehora.net/journal/2005/09/in_unison.html/

    Bob

  4. ben | Sep 13, 2005 at 7:33 am | Permalink

    i had all sorts of prob­lems with win­dows xp home — it can’t seem to talk to any­thing. microsoft’s “simple” home net­work­ing is a big pain and i had a lot less trouble when i installed xp pro­fes­sional instead.

    ooh, like your live pre­view by the way! :)

  5. Lauren Wood | Sep 13, 2005 at 10:41 am | Permalink

    Thanks for the com­ments, everyone!

    Nathan, none of the files are hid­den. The secur­ity set­ting look fine to me.

    Parand, that was a good idea — I have the entire C drive shared, so I deleted the share and then set it up again, mak­ing sure I had all the per­mis­sions set to Full Con­trol for Every­one. Didn’t work. Sigh.

    Bob, thanks for the tip — I’ll try that next. I usu­ally use Fol­der­Match to sync files between the XP machines, and it’s not see­ing the files and dir­ect­or­ies either, which is what first aler­ted me to the prob­lem (sync onto a laptop to take work with me, dis­cover at my des­tin­a­tion the .xml and .xsl and .css files didn’t make it). And my next step was going to be look­ing for a tool to sync onto the Sol­aris box, so Uni­son looks good for that as well.

    Ben, I do have XP Pro­fes­sional on both machines, so it’s not an XP Home arti­fact. BTW, the live pre­view comes with Word­Press by default, which is one of the reas­ons I like it.

  6. artem | Sep 25, 2005 at 1:31 pm | Permalink

    I don’t have a ready answer, but I might have some google keywords for you to try out. There seems to be a con­nec­tion between this prob­lem and Win­dows secur­ity update KB885250 from 2/8/2005.

  7. Dash | Dec 30, 2005 at 4:18 pm | Permalink

    Just to reignite an old thread, I have found the same issue too. You are not alone, and it is quite strange indeed. Seems one way to refresh the file list­ing is to use the host’s IP address instead of the DNS/NetBIOS name for sharing.

    Seems to be related to the above art­icle, but with SP2 on XP I don’t think you can remove it. Another great joy of Microsoft. I knew there would be ANOTHER good reason not to down­grade from 2000 to XP…

  8. ping | Feb 06, 2006 at 2:42 pm | Permalink

    don’t know is it related dir­ectly, but recently I had sim­ilar prob­lem, it star­ted when I disabeled short file names (8.3) sup­port. Seems that prob­lem had gone when turned back on.

    com­mand line to turn off:
    fsutil beha­vior set disable8dot3 1
    and on:
    fsutil beha­vior set disable8dot3 0

  9. Mark | Mar 12, 2006 at 6:11 pm | Permalink

    Hi, ok guys I’ve found the prob­lem, well, after post­ing onto a news­group — someone answered my prob­lem for me, and know­ing how frus­trat­ing this is (com­pletely messes up net­work use) I thought I’d help.

    Basic­ally, the win­dows patch that most of you will have installed through win­dows update — patch num­ber 885250, is caus­ing the problem.

    Microshaft have obvi­ously fucked some­thing up here — caus­ing the invis­ible files / folders problem.

    So, add remove pro­grams, check the show updates box, and scroll down untill you find patch 885250 — and unin­stall it. Do this for all of the machines on your network.

    Sure remov­ing a win­dows update patch isn’t the greatest of solu­tions, but it’s solves the prob­lem and I doubt that I’d bene­fit from hav­ing that patch installed any­way, the bene­fits of using my home net­work as it’s sup­posed to be used are far greater.

    Prob­lem solved!!!
    Mark.

  10. Deon | Mar 13, 2006 at 4:22 pm | Permalink

    This prob­lem has been bug­ging me for a while now as well.
    Very frus­trat­ing as I’m sure you are already aware.

    Unfor­tu­nately, 885250 sounds like it fixes a pretty crit­ical flaw so unin­stalling it is prob­ably not ideal.

    This com­ment was my first stop at find­ing (hope­fully) a solu­tion to this prob­lem so Thank you so much for that. As you found its kind of dif­fi­cult to know how to even begin search­ing for a prob­lem like this.

    Any­ways, I found the art­icle relat­ing to this exact issue and it provides a Hot­Fix for it. Why it doesn’t get installed auto­mat­ic­ally with Win­dows update to cor­rect this issue is bey­ond me, but there you go thats MS for you.

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896427

    Hope it helps.

  11. Lauren | Mar 27, 2006 at 12:57 pm | Permalink

    Thanks Deon, the hot­fix worked! I had to apply it on both com­puters run­ning XP (after “veri­fy­ing” Win­dows XP yet again). I agree remov­ing a patch is not ideal, so I’m pleased MSFT did finally fix the prob­lem. Find­ing things in the know­ledge base is always an issue, although since it looks like they fixed the prob­lem some time after I first pos­ted about it, I don’t feel too bad about not hav­ing found any­thy­ing use­ful that prob­ably didn’t exist at that time.

  12. Lee | Apr 02, 2007 at 10:01 am | Permalink

    What about for Win­dows x64? I tried installing the hot­fix and it tells me that it was cre­ated for dif­fer­ent hard­ware platform.

  13. Cathy | Sep 11, 2007 at 2:49 pm | Permalink

    I had a sim­ilar prob­lem that I fixed by mov­ing the files to a new subdirectory:

    z:\ dir

    (none of the files I was look­ing for were lis­ted, just some stuff that was old & junk & none of the desired files showed in Win­dows Explorer)

    z:\ dir jb2007*

    (all of my files were listed!!!)

    z:\ mkdir 2007

    z:\ cd 2007

    z:\ move ..\jb20070* .

    z:\ dir

    (all my files were lis­ted & I could see them in Win­dows Explorer as well)

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