I had a file downloaded from torrent by a media center device on an external hard disk. The file has an invalid filename such as "Movie ** 480p ** NEW.wmv" (without the quotes). I cannot delete or rename the file in any way probably because of the asterisks "**" in the file name. Do you have any ideas what I can do?
Details: The external drive uses an NTFS file system. I tried Windows, Windows command line, OSX terminal, Ubuntu but could not delete it. I can see the file by "dir" or "ls" commands, but when I try to delete or rename I get "No such file or directory" or a similar error. So the file can be shown but cannot be operated on by all OSs I mentioned above. I thought I deleted it with Ubuntu Terminal commands but the file and the folder it is in is only moved to ".Trash" folder and it is stuck there.
I tried various suggestions in various forums:
- rm -r
- rm *
- del *
- rmdir
- rmdir -r
- dir /x (does not work on Windows 8.1)
- find . -inum number_here -exec rm -i {} \;
- shell scripts in Linux to delete files
- rm "Movie ** 480p ** NEW.wmv"
- rm -- 'file_name_here' (and variants)
- chkdsk f: (This actually ended up with an error)
- Using 7Zip
...and many other suggestions on different forums to similar problems, none of them work. My last option is using a hex editor and change the file name manually on disk but that may mess up the Master File Table. In addition, I could not locate what sector the MFT is.
One user on this thread solved this problem by connecting his drive to an Android system but my Android devices do not have USB connections and the original media center device cannot delete or rename the file either.
Any other suggestions?