Opening a folder sometimes causes the WPS to hang

Last Updated: 7th January, 1995

Symptoms

When a WPS folder is opened, it draws some of its contents and then hangs. If the user presses Ctrl-ESC, PM will eventually display a "folder not responding" message.

These symptoms start to occur with increasing frequency, usually with folders that are heavily used.

Problem

Possible corruption of the WPS folder's Extended Attributes (EAs)

Procedure

This procedure is suggested as a possible treatment for the symptoms described above. It is not claimed that it will treat all cases of WPS hang.

Determine the name of the hanging folder
Press Ctrl-ESC several times. PM should display a message of the form: "folder not responding". folder is the name of the folder that needs "surgery".
Shut-down and boot to the command line
To boot to a command line, hold ALT-F1 down during the time that the OS/2 <white-blob> message is showing. Then select C for command line. Wait a while until a command prompt appears.
If you need to edit a file while in this mode, type:
```
TEDIT filename
```

For a folder, \ADesktopFolder, on the desktop:

Recover the EAs for \ADesktopFolder from an archive:

   EAUTIL "\ADesktopFolder" /s /r 
   EAUTIL "\os2\archives\0x\ADesktopFolder" HOLDFILE /s /r /p
   EAUTIL "\ADesktopFolder" HOLDFILE /j

For other directories:
Split off the directory's EAs:
```
   EAUTIL directory /s /r
```
Since the archiving process only archives desktop folders, the best you can do for other directories is to split off the possibly bad EAs.
If you ever need to restore them, use:
```
   EAUTIL directory /j /o
```
Reboot to the Workplace Shell
```
EXIT
```

Notes

The inspiration behind this procedure was to recognise that some of the information about how a folder displays itself is stored in the extended attributes of the folder's directory entry. Since the symptoms occur when the folder is opened for display, I thought that this might imply that the information in the folder's EAs was corrupted in some way. To test this hypothesis, I applied the procedure above. It worked!

I use HPFS partitions, so I don't know whether this procedure will work as well with FAT partitions due to differences in the way EAs are stored on FAT partitions. If someone tries this with FAT folders and it works, let me know!

One benefit of this procedure over a full archive restore is that the most recent full archive might be too old to be useful. By restoring the EAs for a single folder, the rest of the current desktop can be preserved.

[I updated this procedure on 7th January, 1995 to use the EAUTIL tool. Use of this tool resulted in considerable simplification of the procedure - jon]

jon seymour (jon@zeta.org.au)

The Warp Pharmacy