[Asus Transformer TF700] elfaure:
Double directories? This is getting out of hand!

Well I am backing up my MicroSD now, and I just ran across two directories with the same name in the same folder? Two "Scripts". How is this possible? One had files, the other was blank? How can the OS allow this to happen? :mad: When it copied to Windows, a (1) was appended to the directory name of the second duplicate.

Just for S&G, I tried to copy a file from one into the other and Windows errored saying something like "device is busy or has been disconnected."

If I had files in both directories and I cd to that directory, which one would I get (trick question)? I believe the dups are only on Windows. I don't think the device actually sees both directories. At least it doesn't show them to me in ES. Bizarre corruption. That surely might explain why files in this directory were getting corrupted. Or maybe the corruption of the files was responsible for the double directories. Time for a format (and a beer) for sure. :confused::eek:

Let this be a word to the wise:

So yes I am going to format this, but I wanted to play with this problem a bit and see what I could figure out. As I predicted, and made about my 5th backup just in case, here's what just happened.

1. When there were Script dir duplicates, I could copy from the one with files.

2. I deleted the one without files (predicting it may delete both, but it only deleted the blank one as intended but...)

3. The remaining Script dir could not be copied from, nor a new sub-directory created inside. File names could not be changed. Actually it did allow me to make a copy, but the target directory was blank.

4. Deleted the second Script directory. Now the B2R script is lost forever (no just kidding, I have 5 backups at least)

5. Copied one of my backup copies of Scripts back to the card

6. Now its fine (until I can format it), I can copy from it and create sub-dirs inside it, etc. But I will be working off another copy in Internal storage until I format this card.

7. So the lesson here is ALWAYS make a backup before something glitches out on you because it eventually will and you will need it, or choose to be SOL; life is full of choices. And if it has already glitched out on you, make a second backup of your critical files just in case something like this happens to you and you've made incremental changes. Without my backups I would be loosing about 3 months work in just this one folder alone. It contains every script I have ever written and a bunch of example scripts to learn from.

[MENTION=4878287]_that[/MENTION] to comment, but this is what I think happened: This must be some kind of corrupt FAT problem. Very similar to the recovery blob not being found by the bootloader issue from a recent post, but instead of a partition problem its a file allocation table problem, as they reside on the same partition in my case, quote _that below:

"I have a new theory about why this happens: partition tables mismatch. In other words: The location where the recovery writes the blob is not the same as where the bootloader expects it. Thus the bootloader ignores your blob."

It seems the empty directory was the directory the system thought the files were in. Once that directory was removed, the actual one (as the human perceives; as seen in ES) containing files no longer contained them, as far as the OS was concerned. So by deleting the one you effectively deleted the other because its impossible that can can coexist and both be functional. I thought something like this would happen and it did. Like I said earlier, its Miller time.