Now I've gone and done it!!

[sbob420]

I thought making a simple program to copy a file from one place to another was easy. boy was i wrong. :eek:
I opened a notepad typed in "copy d:\blah.blah to c:\blah.blah" saved it renamed it to a exe. ran it. didnt work. went to delete it cant delete it. it says "cannot delete it is being used by anoter person or program." I restarted my computer and treid to delete again. same thing. restarted to safe mode and tried to delete..... same thing. tried safe mode with command prompt.......yes you got it same thing. if i try to rename it i get the same error message.

please help. :confused:

[Imperion1]

Try booting up with a bootable floppy disk.

[sbob420]

i just tried it im running winxp pro the drive is formatted ntfs and my boot disk doesnt recognize it.

[pyssdogg]

dude you can't jus type some stuff in notepad and rename it with an *.exe extension and think it will run ...doesn't work like that

you can however make it a batch file (*.bat) to run at a command prompt

have you ever thought of dragging and dropping or even cut and paste?

[sbob420]

yes i realize that now. i know how to copy and paste or drag and drop but it was not for me i was trying this it was for a computer illiterate friend. i need help not criticism. if i wanted to be bashed for doing something dumb i go to some chat line and do it there

[BipolarBill]

He's right. He's just being informal. You need to create a batch file like this:

COPY C:\MSDOS.SYS D:\

Save is as WHATEVER.BAT

Notice that the second path is open and not a file - it's folder. So, you're telling Windows to copy the MSDOS.SYS file to the D: directory (or drive). If you specify a file as the destination, it won't work. The destination is always a directory or folder.

The only way to ditch that EXE file you created is to boot up, press F8 after POST and select Safe Mode Command Prompt and manually delete it. You can also boot from the Windows CD and use the Recovery Console.

[EldestNorski]

Yeah, safe mode seems like a sure kill, but why does he need it for this?

I've made more bad .exe files than I care to count, but del always deleted them without complaint -- modulo security settings, of course.

Any idea what's different here?

[Johnny Fist]

Can you see it in task manager? If you can then you can just kill the process there.

Otherwise, try opening a command prompt by typing "cmd" in the run box. Then open the task manager again and kill explorer.exe. After explorer is dead type del X:Path to problem file you created.exe

Reboot and enjoy.

[sbob420]

I ve tried doing it in safe mode with command prompt and it didnt work there either i will try the recovery console didnt think of that. thanks.

No its not in the task manager as well that was what was stumping me.

[sbob420]

thnkas jonny that worked