Leatherboard1

what to do if a folder is named with a colon

I used partition magic to merge two of my drives. I didn't know I was going to name the folders, so I named one D: , one E:. Then I have problem opening two drives load of stuff. Fortunately, I found a solution in the end. So what do you do if you have a colon for your folder name.

The solution is simply Linux! I tried several Windows tools. The data recovery tools work to "recover" your data but you might not have that much space to copy them and it wastes a lot of time. The commander type softwares don't work either. The reason is in windows, colon is used as an "alternate data stream" symbol. But in Linux it is not.

So just find a Live Linux distribution like Ubuntu and plug it into your cd-rom. Mount the windows drive and change the folder's name because Linux had no problem handling folders with names with colons. If you know some Linux, you know what to do already. If not, leave a question. (It may take me a long time to reply, so the simplest way is probably search for how to mount a windows drive in Linux, there will be tons of answers.)

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