Holy CRAP!

I tried to commit my changes to svn and was greeted by a very distressing message: “cannot delete lock, the directory is corrupt or unreadable”.

I tried a few hacks to get around it but apparently my trunk was littered with these unfortunate locks. I have no idea what this means at a low level except that either Windows or Svn(or tortoise) took a big fat dump in my directory

Google to the Rescue

As usual, Google turned up forums where people had the same issue. The only suggestion was to run chkdsk on the drive. One person reported success using a utility called “unlocker” but indicated that the program ran chkdsk. Ok, how do you do that, exactly? in VMWare?

Running Chkdsk under VMWare Fusion

Turns out its really easy. Bring up a command line and type “chkdsk /R C:”. You’ll be told the volume is currently in use and asked if you’d like to run chkdsk the next time Windows is restarted. Answer “Y” and then reboot.

During step 2 of 5, chkdsk reported 15 variations of “Deleting index entry lock in index $130 of file 38956″. That sure sounds like my problem. I hope it is because step 4 of 5 takes forever. It might be wise to use the commandline switch that tells chkdsk to do a less vigorous check of files. I didn’t so I am waiting…

Vista to XP to Server 2003

I started using Vista on this computer and finally just couldn’t take the slowness anymore. I switched to XP but soon realized that all the locked down features were getting in my way. I am now developing on Windows Server 2003 and until today, was very, very happy. Now I am waiting to Windows to do its funky chicken dance, yet again. At least Server tells me what it is doing while I am unable to get my work done. Vista wasn’t nearly so communicative. Its like having a good friend who always says that really offensive thing at the most inopportune time. 90% of the time, you are having a good time. Every now and then you’d like to kick him in the teeth.

hey, thirty minutes later and its done!

..and the verdict is: (waiting… waiting… waiting… ugh! still waiting… FIXED

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 8:35 am and is filed under VMWare, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.