[Srdan]

Update 2010-03-16

NAILED IT.

I actually got as far as booking a date to return the drive to Seagate, which was going to be a tremendous hassle for me on account of having to stay home from work so they could pick the box up, and stuff. Before doing this, I decided to delete all the other files off the drive just so it contained no personal information when it was sent back. This turned out to leave a whole lot more undeletable files on the drive, most of them very old metadata from back when I used to use TortoiseSVN.

This got me wondering what the common theme was between the files. I wondered if maybe it was that they had been created by programs which had been running in place on the drive (with whose permissions?) and then realised that the common feature was that all the files were pretty old. They harkened back to an era when I was actually still trying to get user access and permissions to work on the Central Axis (it doesn't work very well and the web interface is astoundingly sluggish, so now I just use the single Public user, no username, no password).

Bear in mind that the user permissions on all of the files just had three names: one was "Everyone" and the other two were long, unidentifiable strings of numbers. But, I thought, what do those numbers refer to? Users on the MCA, that's who. What I did was recreate an ancient, long-since deleted user account with the name of "Sam". I unmounted the network drive, and then remounted it using the username and password of this new user. I was then able to delete the files.

Basically the files had been created by a user which no longer existed. All I had to do was recreate that account and log in using its credentials.

Some of you will deride me for not thinking of this sooner, and you can all kindly hold your peace because none of you thought of it at all!

Two and a half weeks or thereabouts? What's your record for the longest time spent attempting to solve a technical problem before succeeding?

http://qntm.org/nas

Probaj napraviti usera root, logirati se s njim i obrisati - sumnjam da će u tvom slučaju uspjeti, ali ništa te ne košta.
Ako ne uspije probaj kompjuter staviti u Unix workgrupu pa opet probaj s root accountom.