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Hi to Ubuntu Community,

I was opening one of my folders when I noticed that the folder, and all the others around it, had a lock on each one, and then disappeared. And now, when I want to delete, modify or write to any of the files inside any of those directories, I can't. The menu shows all the commands, but the ones for rename, delete to trash, etc, are not functional-they are in gray. I don't know how this happened, and I don't find anywhere how to address this problem. I am using Ubuntu 20.04 Fossa Foca.

Thanks for your assistance in this,

Jorge Robles

David
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user312972
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  • you might find this video of help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y3U4MYtOmw – graham Mar 28 '22 at 17:09
  • If you open a terminal and type mount, there are some lines. two are importent: the one with /dev/ ...on / and /dev/... on /home/, for example /dev/sdb3 on /home type ext4 (rw,relatime). If your /home/ is a own filesystem, we need to take a look here. If not, we'll focus on /. -> Is there rw or ro inside the brackets? ro means 'read only', so the system was detecting some error in the filesystem, maybe caused by a hardware issue, and want to give you the opportunity to safe your files, but can't hold them stable in normal work-mode. ... (rw stands for 'read/write'). – LupusE Mar 28 '22 at 18:05

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I can't comment on posts yet, but this sounds like a hardware error. You may have a failing hard drive, or there may be some other bad electronics causing corruption. You don't say if you have a spinning disk or an SSD, but look at this post for information about checking for bad sectors: Mark bad sectors on hard drive without formatting

rand'Chris
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Thanks a lot for your rapid response!!!! I couldn't come yesterday because I lost power and my laptop has a bad battery, so only powers with a cord.

I found something interesting. When the power came back, I went to check some information in my files, and to my surprise, all those files that were previously locked, were now unlocked!!!! I was able to edit, add folders and more files, delete, rename files, etc. I don't know how this happened. I have not been able to re-create the conditions, but certainly losing power fixed the problem. I have not tried anything from answer # 1 because did not have need to do that, the original state came back. But answer # 2 left me kind of curious. My Asus ROG g75vw gaming laptop has two drives, a 500GB SSD for dual Windows10/Ubuntu 20.04 booting and data, and a 500GB Seagate Barracuda for data. There are not new, they are at least 5 years old and are original to the laptop. Just one month ago Ubuntu crashed so badly that I got a black screen, so I sent to a technician who knows Linux so he recovered my files and re-installed Ubuntu and Windows. He thinks it was a bad nVidia Video driver that crashed my laptop at the time, so he did total new installation with new drivers and now the laptop, except for that weird file stuff, is working perfectly- Boots within 25 seconds, I can open 15-20 sessions with 15-20 open websites apiece, and no lag at all when I switch among them. But I am still curious of what happened. I am using an external 2GB SSD for file back-ups from now on. Any comments? Thanks again for your fast and generous help, the Lord bless you all!!!!!!

user312972
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