have you tried deleting the whole folder as I suggested?

yes, trust me...ive tried all of these things. i can't delete any folder which contains things that contain folders which contain this MPEG. when i use the Delinvfile there is a yellow triangle with an "!" in it that says

-Corrupt FIle
The file or directory H:\blah blah is corrupt and unreadable. please run the chkdsk utility.

it may be more difficult since its on the external hard drive. i cannot do anything on this in safemode. ive already tried. it cant be opened, renamed, moved, etc.

then follow AW's advice and download the disk diagnostic/repair utilities from seagate

thanks
 

i just reformatted the drive, wiped it out. problem solved :-)

lol...yes, that certainly will solve that particular problem...

as a note external drives are substandard to those directly connected to your MoBo...USB are real bad...though firewire has a transfer rate good enough to get by when using for pro audio recording...i.e. I would use the external as storage and move files there once completed and verified...

also, it would be a good idea to run chkdsk on that drive even though you just reformatted it...and I hope you formatted it to NTFS....

my H is external
ONLY used for back up bc stuff can be slowed or clogged in the usb
i dont have it on all time

If you ever have to repair or rescan it you can take it out of the case and put the
drive into any working computer, then boot a SpinRite CD and you can even
recover damaged data.

Just in case you need to know.

It can work through USB but it is slower.

Though you might be tempted to just leave it in there
and run it at full speed from now on. ;]

if you really want bad performance try doing a file transfer from and to 2 external USB drives....sheeshus...

nickd818 - Unless I missed it somewhere in those two pages, I didn't see any mention of your having tried re-naming the file, then deleting/erasing it - did you?

I know the problem's already "solved", I'm just curious as to whether you tried that or not since it's worked out well for me quite a few times when I couldn't get files to delete. Pete

When you cannot delete a file you usually cannot rename it either.
Those are cases when some software or the OS has a handle on
the file and can't or won't let go. Malformed media files can cause
this to happen, which is why we usually assume that is the cause.

Malformed filenames or disk structure errors are very rare in
contrast to the usual problem and that's where a rename can help.