Windows 10: Windows folder has turned into a zero length bytes file

Hi all,

Yesterday the pc didn't want to boot. After the reset and after looking inside the hard disk I discovered that in the system disk the windows folder has become a file of zero length.

The disk is a fairly new SSD, and had no problems before yesterday, but another disk traditional HDD used as storage had problems reported on the event viewer and was replaced 4 days ago I'm 100% sure I haven't confused hard drives.

OS: windows 10 pro, latest updated release
PC: old I7 with 22 Gb of RAM, VGA Nvidia 1050. 2xHDD WD 2TB and 2xSSD 250 GB, drives not raid, but it was planned to move to. DVD RAM, SD card reader. Power source: PSU bronze + UPS.
Mainly used for home video processing, and some games.

I could reinstall, but of course the process of restoring the whole system, as it is now, is quite long.
What did I do wrong? Or, do you know if there is any similar problem on windows 10 and a trick to recover windows?

Thanks in advance for any reply.

Thomas

:)

 

Windows folder has turned into a zero length bytes file

Hi all,

Yesterday the pc didn't want to boot. After the reset and after looking inside the hard disk I discovered that in the system disk the windows folder has become a file of zero length.

The disk is a fairly new SSD, and had no problems before yesterday, but another disk (traditional HDD) used as storage had problems reported on the event viewer and was replaced 4 days ago (I'm 100% sure I haven't confused hard drives).

OS: windows 10 pro, latest updated release

PC: old I7 with 22 Gb of RAM, VGA Nvidia 1050. 2xHDD WD 2TB and 2xSSD 250 GB, (drives not raid, but it was planned to move to). DVD RAM, SD card reader. Power source: PSU bronze + UPS.

Mainly used for home video processing, and some games.

I could reinstall, but of course the process of restoring the whole system, as it is now, is quite long.

What did I do wrong? Or, do you know if there is any similar problem on windows 10 and a trick to recover windows?

Thanks in advance for any reply.

Thomas

 

Creating Zero Byte Files of a folder of large sized files

It's probably more elegant to do it in powershell, in a batch file you don't have the commands available that can zero the length of an existing file, or create a new file. It's a bit of a kludge, but it can be done.

DIR can make a list of the filenames, and a FOR loop can work through that list. What you can do is pipe the output of a command that has no output text to a file (so you are making a zero length file, just as you can in Notepad). If that happens to be an existing file it will overwrite it with a new zero length file of the same name. There are very few commands that can be tricked into outputting nothing, but I have found one that will do the job.

This, copied and pasted into a batch file called ZERO.BAT will first list all the files in the current folder to a file called files.txt, then overwrite each of them with a zero length file of the same name. The 'dir /b *.xxx' command was chosen for this as it will produce no output (unless of course you actually do have files with the .xxx extension). It's a one-shot suicidal batch file, as it will in the process zero itself!

Code:

The result is....





As I said, it's a kludge, it's messy because the 'dir /b *.xxx' echos a 'file not found' to the screen, and it leaves behind the files.txt and zero.bat files - but it does work.

 

Movie files become zero-time-length

SOME (NOT ALL) movie files (various file extensions) that play well in VLC-in-Win7 when still on External Hard Drive, are reduced to zero length (but NOT zero bytes) when copied to 64Gb micro SD card, and so do NOT play in VLC (or GOM). Is there a remedy ?