Locked file system?

[garydebergerac]

I have a drive that appears to have gone bad, my D: where most of my programs, user data, etc, has been stored. I had modified my registry so that programs would install to D: by default.

I've installed a second drive and believe I have copied most of what I needed, had done some bad sector repair using SeaTools for DOS, and everything seemed to be fine, albeit with a small loss of data. I installed FreeFile sync to make sure that everything would be synced between the two drives, hoping to extend the life of the one drive that is obviously going bad since it had a lot of programs installed. I ran the sync and the next time I came to my PC, it had crashed and now the bad drive isn't recognized at all.

There was one directory that I missed in my back up, so I tried downloading some utilities to see if I could recover this directory from the bad drive. However, when I try to install the utility (now being downloaded to F:), I keep getting a ShellExecuteEx failed; code 3 error, the system cannot find the path specified.

So, I moved the install program to my C: drive, and I get the same error. So, I thought, well, this must be because I changed my default installation directory and maybe the install program is looking for D:/Temp or something.

But when I searched for Regedit on my c: drive and try to run it, I get a "the specified path does not exist" error. I'm obviously looking at regedit on the C: drive, but I get this error every time. There are also a few other regedits on my C: drive, but same error for all of them. Other programs installed to C: do work, however.

This is the weirdest thing I've ever come across. Any ideas?

The last time I ran FreeFile sync I noticed it tried to 'lock' the filesystem or something like that, probably to prevent changes while it syncs. Could this be the culprit?

Thanks!

[Zenju]

The sync.ffs_lock file is just an ordinary file for the OS and other applications, it only has special meaning for FreeFileSync. Not that this will help much, but at least this potential problem can be excluded...

[svbeachhouse]

How do you get around the
"Cannot set the directory lock" issue?

Exact Error Reads:

Cannot set directory lock for "/Volumes/Music 2016 - Macintosh Formatted".
Cannot write file "/Volumes/Music 2016 - Macintosh Formatted/sync.ffs_lock".
Error Code 22: Invalid argument (open)

sync.ff_lock file was actually written on the drive I was trying to copy from.

I have freshly formatted a Passport drive to copy my music too. (Both are OS extended format).
I have copied this drive before and now need to redo it as the other drive was "misplaced".

When I go to compare and sync, the above message comes up and will not allow the new drive to be written too.
The new drive has read and write permissions.

I found this from another question and if this is the answer, I'm not positive as to what to do with this?

Do I turn the "LockDirectoriesDuringSynch" to "false"?
I pulled up the "document"? and tried to overwrite "true" with false, but don't see how to save that?
Where is this done? (assuming this is what I should be doing?)

https://freefilesync.org/manual.php?topic=expert-settings
[Edit by Zenju 2016-02-25: Replaced copy & paste by actual link]

[svbeachhouse]

I used "textedit" on my Macbook (El Capitan) to make the change on the "LockDirectoriesDuringSync" programming line. I changed the value from "true" to "false".

I then tried to use FFS and it worked...

However, when I go to now look at the global.xml text, I see the following error:

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 12 at column 44: AttValue: " or ' expected
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

Does this matter? It seems to be working?

A FEW HOURS LATER; The program stopped responding and then I got this message when I try and re-start:
ZENJU - I'm new at this, so if you could...step one, step two, etc. please.