[dispatch00]

Hi guys/gals, I am very experienced systems administrator and have run into a very perplexing issue.

I have many media files that work fine when accessed via Windows Explorer (they show up fine, display fine, play in their requisite application fine), but if I try to add (index) them to an application such as Windows Media Player, Zune, WinAmp, or even WASTE (an encrypted file sharing app) some of the files do not show up.

Salient points:
• I am adding the top level directory (e.g. d:\music or d:\video)
• The problem DOES NOT occur when I add the problematic files/directories explicitly (e.g. d:\music\%artist%\%album%)
• The problem does not appear to be a file path length issue (some longer paths work, some shorter ones do not)
• I cannot find a correlation amongst the files that do not show up
• The problem persists across HDDs (I have tried 3)
• The problem persists across operations systems (I have tried XP SP3 and Vista SP1)
• The problem doesn't appear to be permissions related (I have reset them several times)
• I have turned off indexing on the hard drives as I thought that may be part and parcel of the problem but it did not affect the problem

Originally I thought this affected many file types but it does appear to affect only mp3s, but I cannot find a common issue with the ones that aren't working.

Anyway, any suggestions would be welcome and appreciated. Thanks for reading!

Adam

[dispatch00]

I finally managed to fix this..from a command prompt.

attrib /S /D -s -h

The folders were set as system and hidden (I noticed that they were showing up in Windows Explorer but not in DOS).

Simply setting the attributes in windows explorer was not working -- you can't set system and read only applied only to files.