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Folders moving on NT4 network

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9 replies

by lindsay

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I am an IT Technician in a school and recently have been hit by a strange problem. We are experiencing folders moving to somewhere else on the network. It is happening too much to be a user issue. If it happened once I could understand it but it is happening too many times to be a user, plus the fact I don't think many of them would know how to do this. We had been hit by the BugBear Virus before this happened which was not on this network but on the other network that we are running although there is a link between them. The workstations are a mixture of Win 98 and Win 2000pro. I have looked at the permissions, we are running generic logons for the different Key Stage groups and they all have seperate folders on the network which I have set for just that KS group to access. The problem however still is happening. The folders do appear eventually in folders that you wouldn't think - sometimes in subfolders aswell. It is very strange and I have asked our outsourcing company as well and they are equally puzzled.

Any suggestions of what I can do would be considered.

9 replies

by bchesmer

As "zero" said.

Be a bit specific if you can. It sounds like someone, not something at this point.

by banyanman

Try removing the delete permission from the folder only, not the files for everyone including administrators and system. Initiate security logging via auditing on the servers and then periodically sort through the security log and filter for failure attempts. This may help to see if a program or workstation is attempting to move the data folders. The "folder moves" is more than like associate with a user id and you would also be able to track down a machine name as well.

by timwalsh

I have seen this "problem" before and it has always ended up being a user issue. Someone will get "click-happy" (or not click fast enough)while trying to open a file/folder. They end up actually grabbing the file (or folder) and dropping it somewhere else and not even realize it. The culprits are many times novices with Windows (or mice), but sometimes it is just someone in a hurry and not paying attention to what they are doing.

Answer 3 will help you track down the source of the problemas a "move" operation is actually a compination of "copy" and "delete" operations.

Hope this helps.

by curlergirl

This _usually_ turns out to be a user problem, but it is possible that it could be caused by two other things I can think of - a virus or NTFS file system corruption on the server. How long has it been since you ran a full scandisk on the server's hard drive(s)? I'd try this first. If you get a lot of indexing errors, this is probably a root cause of the problem. However, the root cause of the indexing errors could be hard drive problems, so I'd keep a watch on it and consider replacing thehard drive(s) that seem to be getting corrupted. Also - you said you had another system that was hit by a virus, and I think it's very possible this could be one as well - have you done a recent and complete virus scan with Norton or other server-level virus product that has up-to-date definitions? Hope this helps!

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