Two folders with identical (i.e., duplicate) names

I have a similar problem.  Didn't know windows could do this!

I am running Win 7 ultimate x64.  I recently installed Titanium Studio which asks for a project folder.  You can't select "libraries" so I pointed it to the path of my Documents folder - which is not on the usual C but on another drive.  ie: I've moved the library.  It then created the documents folder!?  I now have 2 Documents folders on my D drive.  The one contains the studio files and the other is my documents - this is causing much confusion.  I'm going to remove Studio based on this.

No program should exist on my machine that cause such havoc and doesn't conform to windows standards.

When I say it created the folder, in explorer its clearly there.  It can be renamed without affecting the true doc folder.  There is no difference in name.  HOWEVER in DOS it's not there.  Only 1 documents folder appears, AND if I navigate to the documents folder its the studio folder NOT my documents folder.  FAIL!

I'm not looking for an answer because removing Titanium and deleting the folder will hopefully work BUT this is a windows nightmare.  My indexing and windows search is rotten, backups fail, apps are locating wrong.  This needs attention from Microsoft.

ah yes still a few semi recent posts.. Hope this is still alive and you're not the only ones. 

I deleted a very large folder from my external drive. they both had the exact same name but one was in UPPER CASE and the other in Sentence case. It was a build up of all my user data (other than photos, those are separate thankfully) that I've had and every time I restore or reinstall I dump my stuff in there. 

I checked the properties for each one and they showed as the same size down to the bits, then checked properties for both combined and it showed the size as x2 of that. I deleted one folder and after a while I moused over each of them and. . . WHAT? both of them were being deleted.

so I only followed what I've read, never had experience with this before. do not write anything to the drive.. now running a data recovery program and praying that I can get my stuff back.

I am running Windows 7 64-bit, this is a new machine but those folders have always shown twice since I restored on my other computer. I just never paid them any attention until now. thought they were different and never bothered to give them a good search and clean out what I don't need. now after a quick test I realize folders can't even be in a different case with the same name. so something was wrong there.

Hi All,

Stumbled upon this while looking for ways to get rid of duplicate "My Documents" (etc) appearing in Explorer, one of which is actually just a protected shortcut (and a hidden system file by default). (MS's lame solution to that is to turn off the Show hidden system files in Explorer (sigh)).

Anyhow, I can shed some light on all this other issue (which is NOT the same issue I just mentioned).

Is IS POSSIBLE to intentionally create both folders and files with identical names (if fact identical just about everything in the directory header) but completely different files/data.

However it requires accessing the hard disk directly via the FAT (file allocation tables) and using assembler level code to write the data back to to the FAT blocks. In essence, you need to bypass the disk BIOS (and/or BDOS) used by Windows and write your own. I did this stuff to death in the 1980's before DOS was a for letter word and when Windows was just a dirty thought floating around Bill's brain. I even wrote a floppy disk driver for a multiplexed Z80 based rail signal controller system so I think I know my stuff here, but its been a long time since I last looked at this level.

This problem can sometimes come about by older programs that started life as 1980's DOS-16 assembler libraries. I seem to recall Robocopy was already popular in the mid 1990's so its propbably an obscure bug with the application, but that is now starting to appear because of the way Vista and Win7 do things. Just a guess.

Yes its a bit of a problem because Windows sees these directory entries as all the same file, whereas DOS only ever saw the first one.

It cant be fixed from Windows but its easy enough to fix at a lower level. You'll need to find and load the FAT block yourself, make the change and write it back. Now there were even some (DOS-16 based) programs that let you do this when MFM was king - I think Nortons Disk Utilities was the best one - there were others. They probably dont work with FAT-32/NTFS or today's large disks.

In which case you'll need to write an assembler (or C) program to update the directory. You can even fudge this in the BDOS calls if all you want to do is give the files different names. BDOS will only see the first entry, so rename that one to something else and hey presto, the other one still has the old name and problem solved.

I'll look into this further if enough (say 6 ppl) post a "I want it fixed real bad". Methinks, now that I have enlightened you, its far better to just work around the problem and live with it rather than waste endless amounts of time hoping to fix it. After all, you havent actually lost any files have you ? So try copying them to somewhere else, delete the errant folder(s), and recreate it. If that doesnt work, start learning assembler. :-)

I disagree with "you can't have have two folders with the same name in the same directory"

My "My Documents has two folders called "microsoft" and two folders called "Logtech". I  couldn't see any difference between the folders but I did a "Move to Foilder" from the edit command to an empty directory. The folders had to be merged to copy both. Interesting enough the contents of the folders are not identical.

I am runninig Windows 7 Ultimata 64 bit.