Two folders, same location, identical name

Hello everyone,

I have two folders of the same name in the same location (on an external hard-drive) and both of them have the same name. I don't know what I did but about an hour ago there was only one folder of that name. As you can see both folders are on drive G: and when I open them they are both empty but Windows is saying that one of them is 8 GB big, which is correct. All data for my project is inside but I can't get access to it and I dont want delete any of them in case I loose it.

Maybe one is a hard link to the other, as having two files with the very same name is not allowed. It also might be some serious disk corruption too. Try taking ownership and assign permission to yourself to at least view the whole folder, copy to a secure place, and then delete them both.

Sounds like a corrupted file system to me. I also recommend trying to copy it to another location before doing anything else. If you right click that drive and go to properties, there is a error checking option under the tools tab. Just be advised that that could potentially make things worse if it decides to truncate that messed up folder entry.

I was able to copy the data from the hard-drive using linux. It showed both folders but it also detected the data in one of them so I was able to copy it to another location on the same disk. I need to see now if WIndows 7 finds the folder from which I copied the files. I deleted the empty one using linux.

Thanks for you help.