Mail Archives: cygwin/2007/05/06/08:13:03
On 06 May 2007 12:41, fergus wrote:
> Invariably on connecting my portable drive to a running XP machine, Windows
> runs through AutoPlay and ends by offering various tasks including None Of
> These, which is the option I always choose. The portable drive contains a
> complete Cygwin installation with all links *.lnk marked +R. I have never
> experienced difficulty using Cygwin set up in this way: actually, using a
> script that attends to the mount requirements, it works faultlessly on any
> number of machines including workplace machines with their paranoid owner/
> user/ guest protections apparently in place. So I have exactly one Cygwin
> setup, usable wherever I am on whatever machine, which is a very simple and
> robust arrangement. A colleague with an identical setup reports that
> recently on insertion of the portable drive into a Windows machine, and
> after AutoPlay had run, all +R file attributes were lost on the portable
> machine, rendering all links inoperable. (For clarity: the files *.lnk were
> still there and unchanged, just the +R attribute had been clobbered.
> Effective cure: run "attrib +r *.lnk /s" from a Command prompt.)
> Can anybody offer any illumination on this reported phenomenon and if so,
> suggest a procedure for preventing its occurrence? Thank you.
Well. It seems really improbable that autoplay went all over the disk
altering the attributes, so the problem must have been misdiagnosed. If this
was stage magic, I'd be saying "It's misdirection - the trick is that the +R
attributes had already been removed before the drive was plugged in, or they
were never there in the first place". But this isn't stage magic, so a report
of "I found my data in such-and-such a state, but I don't have a record of
what state it was in before nor any knowledge of what operations might have
been performed on it" isn't likely to produce anything beyond WAGs.
(Actually, it's a report of "Someone else found their data in such-and-such a
state and ..." which is going to be even harder to guess.)
I'd perhaps start with the theory that your colleague has forgotten
something that they've done earlier, possibly a runaway recursive attrib
command or perhaps an inadvertent 'Yes' to 'Apply this change to all contained
files and folders' when playing around with the r-o attrib in windows
explorer, but you don't gots a whole lotta forensics to go on here.
cheers,
DaveK
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