Can’t kill $Txf

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I ran chkdsk on an external drive and while it cleaned out a lot of errors there’s one stubborn file, namely Y:\found.000\dir0000.chk\$Txf, that refuses to go away. Takeown, run from PowerShell as admin reports “INFO: Access is denied. ( “y:\found.000\dir0000.chk\$Txf” )”.

How can I banish this file to the trash heap forever (short of reformatting the drive)?

DaveH52

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Does it disappear after a reboot? If the file does not, what does ICACLS tell you about that file?

How old is that external drive?

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Actually, it seems to be a directory. I’ll reboot and see what happens.

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Run this and post the result.

cacls Y:\found.000\dir0000.chk\$Txf

cheers, Paul

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Try the unlocker app.

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GoneToPlaid

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OK so I tried cacls. Here’s the result:

PS C:\Users\d1har> cacls Y:\found.000\dir0000.chk\$Txf
The system cannot find the file specified.

so I went up a level and:

PS C:\Users\d1har> cacls Y:\found.000\dir0000.chk
Y:\found.000\dir0000.chk NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users:(OI)(CI)(ID)F
BUILTIN\Administrators:(OI)(CI)(ID)F
BUILTIN\Users:(OI)(CI)(ID)F

but Exploder says it’s there. See the pix.

Dave

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Use the Unlocker app which Alex5723 suggested.

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Tried Unlocker as suggested.

No joy

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Unlocker says it’s not locked.

File owner can’t be shown, and when I try to replace the owner, I’m informed that I don’t have permission to view or edit permission settings.

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[GoneToPlaid]

$txf appears to be part of the NTFS file system. See this reddit article about it:

Comment from discussion xray703’s comment from discussion “What is $txf?”.

A quote from the OP:
“I’ve asked Microsoft support even they don’t know.

Edit- after some talking with them they said it had something to do with removable drives. Come to think of it Ive only seen these today after last big update. Besides that for some strange reason all by drives, SSD and HDD are reading as removables. Certainly hope its not a virus though. I’ve been monitoring the processes and it seems to be clear.”

Is your hard drive a removable hard drive, or is it marked as a removable hard drive? If so, don’t mess with this $txf file for the time being. Also check your firewall to see if the TXF network access was blocked, which would indicate malware.

I just attached one of my removable drives to my computer. Then I configured Explorer to show all operating system files. I did not see any $txf file on my removable hard drive. It may be that when you ran chkdsk, chkdsk may have recovered an orphaned $txf file.

If everyone thinks that it is safe for you to delete this file, you could try installing Take Ownership. See this How-To-Geek article about how to install Take Ownership. Skip to the bottom where you can download a ZIP file which contains two REG files. One REG file installs Take Ownership into the Explorer context menu, and the other REG file removes it.

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-take-ownership-to-explorer-right-click-menu-in-vista/

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by GoneToPlaid. Reason: I found out what a $txf file is

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$Txf is definitely a normal metafile for the deprecated Tranactional NTFS.

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Microfix

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That looks like disk corruption.

Make a full backup.
Run some disk tests with the disk manufacturers diags.
If all is OK, relax – these things happen.

Don’t forget to make regular backups to protect against corruption, failure etc.

cheers, Paul

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Yes, seen that before.

Occasionally physical damage to the relevant block, sometimes just NTFS is too messed up.

Got this kind of thing on a Windows XP system myself once, years ago. Even booting to Linux and getting a root shell didn’t get me permission to delete it, disk reported no physical errors. I’m fairly sure it still didn’t report write errors when I wiped the disk with “dd if=/dev/zero …” but, like I said, years ago.

Also it was just a normal file under \Program Files\some application… which application I’d tried to uninstall or upgrade or something, don’t remember exactly, a routine operation.

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After backing up the disk contents, there may be another way to remove this metafile. If there is nothing else to lose, by trying…

As described here, if you have a Windows 10 rescue USB stick (or even using a Macrium Reflect rescue media) and an prior installation of 7-Zip. You might be able to attempt deletion of the with the 7-Zip File Manager (7zFM).

Please let us know if works.

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Windows 10: open Command Prompt as administrator, then run this:

takeown /r /d y /f folder.000
to take ownership of the folder, and then:

icacls found.000 /reset /t

Once reset you can open the folder using windows explorer or delete it like normal folders.

https://superuser.com/questions/1310103/remove-found-000-folder-completely

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I want to thank everyone for their suggestions. Unfortunately none of them has worked, so I’m going with the nuclear option. Since it WAS my backup drive, I’ve moved everything off of it and onto other drives for now. I’ve deleted the partition, created a new partition, and just formatted it. I’m going to run h2testw.exe on the drive, that I expect will fail. It’s a 6TB drive so it will probably take a few days. Meanwhile, CrystalDiskInfo has flagged the drive as bad, so I’m going to start the RMA process with WD. It was installed on Nov 11 2020, so they should send me a replacement (that will be thoroughly tested with h2testw before being used).

Thanks again for all the suggestions!

Dave

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You could just use CHKDSK /r. Does the same job, no download.

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

You could just use CHKDSK /r. Does the same job, no download.

cheers, Paul

chkdsk /r was the first thing I tried.

After blowing away the partitions, repartitioning, and long formatting, the S.M.A.R.T. monitor decided to change its status to good.  H2restw is still running after 16 hours and is due to complete in about 8 hours.

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[DaveH52]

So I’ve discovered it’s a shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drive. That explains why writing to it starts off like gangbusters then quickly goes to zero. It also explains why when backing up to it takes days, and isn’t finished when it’s time for the next backup. For more about that see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording

and

https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/

Does anyone know if Windoze 10 truly supports SMR drives?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by DaveH52.

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DaveH52 wrote:

Windoze 10 truly supports SMR drives

Windows 10 supports SMR drives.

More about SMR drive

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DaveH52 wrote:

It also explains why when backing up to it takes days

That is not the reason, unless your backup software is performing random writes or other processes are using the disk as well.
SMR performs well with sequential writes.

backup storage is a perfect application (for SMR) as the Macrium backups are written out almost entirely sequentially as it is a performance advantage even for conventional disks

cheers, Paul

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Well I killed it! After re-partitioning and re-formatting it’s gone!

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And the drive is healthy? What says SMART?

cheers, Paul

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SMART says no problems, Chkdsk says no problems, WD DataLifeguard extended test says no worries, and H2Testw, that writes and reads from almost every sector said no errors.

It took nearly a week to run all those tests, but I guess the drive is OK.

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Paul T

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