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FFPortable cache files don't want to delete.

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Snowwall
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Last seen: 17 years 1 month ago
Joined: 2007-10-14 21:12
FFPortable cache files don't want to delete.

I use FirefoxPortable on my USB. Today it complained that it can't resolve a problem with security config files. The master password couldn't be changed, etc.
Guessing that some files on the USB are corrupted (probably unplugged the stick at the wrong time), I tried reinstalling/updating the program. The installer said that it can't overwrite firefox.exe (turned out it was read-only). On launch, FF still said it couldn't do anything about password saving part of itself.
In the end, Windows finally found "a corrupted file somewhere in the F:/FirefoxPortable/profile directory", so I tried to delete the whole directory. It seems that 9 files in the "F:\FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\Cache" and the file cert8.db don't want to die. After I delete them, they reappear. Renaming them gave FF a chance to work properly, but I still can't delete them.
Anybody knows how to do it?

José Pedro Arvela
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Last seen: 5 years 11 months ago
Joined: 2007-07-10 07:29
When a drive is corrupt the

When a drive is corrupt the only way of deleting certain files is formatting the drive. When a file is corrupted the header section of that file gets messed up too, and when you try to delete that file it can't read that header saying where the file is, so it cant delete it.

Here is a example of to files on a really small hard drive: one nice and other corrupted:

HardDrivePartition1Start-00000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
File1Startline3caract25-NiceFile.txt-File1
Endline3caract3600000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Filg2jbiofjvnefjgsajtnr-CorZuptFile.t7t-Fl
nffjhvbigjfjgvjg00000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000HardDrivePartition1End

The corrupted file has a corrupt header (and should have corrupted content, but I wanted you to know that that was the corrupt file), so, when a file is deleted, it can't delete the header because it can't find a good header (when a file is deleted only the header is deleted).

Blue is everything.

Snowwall
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Last seen: 17 years 1 month ago
Joined: 2007-10-14 21:12
Thanks, but formatting seems

Thanks, but formatting seems too harsh a measure. I guess, Linux would manage to delete anything I asked (after all, it even managed to run a search through these files), but I can't check it now. After I restarted Windows at school and it found the messed-up USB, it decided to fix it. Surprisingly, it worked and now the files are normal Smile
I wonder if it's possible to make Firefox history and stuff to write onto the USB in sessions - every five minutes, for example. Then it would be less likely to interrupt the writing and get an incomplete file. And most of the history would still be there, without rewriting the disk too often...

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