WinXP Home Network
January 21, 2005 5:58 PM   Subscribe

WinXP Home Network: Two machines, each running WinXP. I 'm successfully sharing most of the files in a folder, but get "access denied" on some of them. [+]

The message I get is

Cannot copy doit.exe : Access is denied.

Make sure the the disk is not full or write-protected, and that the file is not currently in use.


This happens for MPG and EXE files, but not for things like DAT or JPG. Only happens when I am on the new machine grabbing files from the old one: if I'm on the old one, I can put the same files onto the new one's HD just fine.

I must be missing something... someone please enlighten me!
posted by Daddio to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)
 
Try just sharing the whole damn drive. That worked for me when I had a similar problem with a similar setup.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 6:14 PM on January 21, 2005


Response by poster: Tried that. Now it's choking on a ZIP file (same message).

Damn, I hate Windows!
posted by Daddio at 6:38 PM on January 21, 2005


Erm, well, google's not helping much, but if you're getting the same error relating to the same "doit.exe" when you try to move a variety of files, that means something's up.

The Google search seems to indicate doit.exe might be some sort of malware. When it's reported in HiJack This! logs, users are being told to remove it. So you might be infested.
posted by m0nm0n at 8:05 PM on January 21, 2005


doit.exe is an old app for shell scripting that runs a program in the background, which allows the shell script to continue running while the app is executed instead of the default behavior of waiting for the app to exit. For all I know, it might be used by malware, or it might be a trojan version, but it doesn't automatically suggest malware.

Since the error you mentioned is almost always caused by a process having the file open, the biggest problem is finding out which one. For that, MS Server 2003 Resource Kit, which also supports Windows XP, has a command-line utility called oh.exe, which will tell you what process has a file open. Then, you can quit that process and start again.
posted by boaz at 9:24 PM on January 21, 2005


Aaaah, thanks for the info, boaz.
posted by m0nm0n at 9:59 PM on January 21, 2005


If you still really want the files, you might want to just take ownership of the parent directory, and replace the permissions on the entire directory structure. Just don't do this to your Windows directory. That would be very bad.
posted by idlemind at 4:39 AM on January 22, 2005


« Older Videoconferencing   |   Help me find old military hardware on playgrounds Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.