Windows 10: The Directory Name Is Invalid

OK, here's my situation. I have a Western Digital (WD) My Passport Ultra external USB hard drive. I use this as a media drive on my WD TV Live Plus media player. For some unknown reason, the media player will sometimes corrupt files on the My Passport drive. The net effect is that a file is somehow changed into a directory.

The problem is when I attempted to delete/remove the corrupted file/directory, I receive a 'The directory name is invalid.' error.

I've tried the following:

• Run chkdsk /f; no errors found.
• Run WD Drive Utilities diagnostics; no errors found.
• Checked dir /x looking for an 8.3 filename; no luck.
• Taken ownership of the directory; no luck.
• Tried a few file unlocker utilities; no luck (not reported as locked and delete fails).
• Even tried an NTFS disk editor; no luck.

I've spent the last three hours googling a solution. Nothing!

Anyone else ever encountered something similar and found a solution?

:)

 

The directory name is invalid.

Windows 10 did an update last night... and now I cant open any files on the NAS. I can see the folders but cant open files within the folder.

same goes for google drive.

I can open files on drop box though...

 

The directory name is invalid.

Hi,

This could be a compatibility issue with NAS (Network-attached storage). There's a lot of improvement happened in Windows 10. We recommend you to send a feedback using the Feedback Hub app. This feedback is collated and reviewed by our product
specialists, and can be a candidate for future release.

Refer to this link on how to Send feedback to Microsoft with the Feedback Hub app.

We look forward to your response.

 

Well, I just tried IObit Unlocker and that successfully deleted the directory.

I am still interested in knowing about any native solution that does not required a third-party utility...

 

It used to happen in the old MSDOS days regularly - file and directory names would get corrupted and you had to do tricks with wildcard characters to get them deleted.

Like with a file or folder that had one readable x in the 7th position of the 8 character filename, and the rest gibberish - sometimes it worked.
ren *x?.* ffffffx?.*
del f*.*
rmdir or rd f*.* /s
deltree f*.*
etc.