Hello!

Some time ago I saved a LibreOffice document to an external USB NTFS-formatted hard disk. It messed up due to using a USB hub with other devices attached.

Now when I try to mount and open the hard disk (in Thunar, in Manjaro), I get an error message along the lines of (translating to English): Could not open folder disk_name. Error in obtaining information about the file '/run/media/user_name/disk_name/.~lock.file_name.odt#': input/output error.

However, the disk does in fact mount. I can display the files in its subfolders in Thunar, and open files. Thunar only throws the error when I ask it to display the base folder. In the console, ls -la shows the troublemaker as

-?????????? ? ? ? ? ? .~lock.file_name.odt#

I can neither rm nor chmod the file, with sudo or without: that gives I/O errors.

After the mess-up I tried to connect the disk to an old Windows computer to run chkdsk, but the old Win would not recognize the drive and then I made it worse by trying to force it to use some drivers. After this stupid detour, back on Linux I ran testdisk on it, chose Intel/PC partition > Analyse. IIRC it showed two NTFS partition entries (there is actually only a single partition on the disk): one that uses all of the disk and one that started a bit further on. I picked the former, and chose 'Write partition structure to disk'. This resulted in a usable HD as described above, but still with the broken file reference.

I do not need to recover the file in question. How can I remove the messed-up reference to it?

Thanks for any ideas!

Navigate to a subdir of the USB drive in your console & try
the extra '\' is needed before any unusual character in a filename. Also worth a try is a line like
That wioll offer to delete everything individually, but you can answer 'y' or 'n' to each.

If there is nothing you want on that usb, use gparted. just delete the partition, then reestablish it.

Have you tried ntfsfix (part of the ntfsprogs package)?

fsck?

No, ntfsfix