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steve12955's avatar
steve12955
Explorer | Level 3
8 years ago

Location is not available... the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable

I occasionally use an old Toshiba laptop with Windows 10.  I tried to access some Word and PDF files in Dropbox from the C: drive and got the error message: "Dropbox is not accessible.  The file or d...
desktop
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Jane's avatar
Jane
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
8 years ago
Thanks for looping back to me here steve12955, let’s investigate the possible cause of the error you’re getting in a bit more depth & we’ll take it from there! 
 
I was able to run a search on my end for some tips on this error message, let’s recap you previous points & we’ll take it from there. 
 
For starters, as you’ve mentioned that you’re trying to access you files from your C:\ drive, can you also clarify whether you had moved Dropbox on a removable drive previously? Had you installed Dropbox its default location on your Toshiba device? 
 
If the Dropbox folder resided in a different location on your device, can you let me know whether the drive was formatted to a supported filesystem (ex. NTFS, HFS, ext4, APFS, which support extended attributes)? Any detail you could send me in regards to your previous setup (in relation to Dropbox) would be very helpful, so as to narrow down the possible causes. 
 
Thanks for all your time & efforts & I’ll be awaiting your next update on this discussion here. Happy Friday Steve! 
steve12955's avatar
steve12955
Explorer | Level 3
8 years ago

Hi Jane,

 

Thanks for your reply.  Unfortunately, I did not move my Dropbox location nor install it on another device.  It's been part of my laptop's C: drive since it was originally installed years ago.  As mentioned, it appears the files are accessible from my phone and desktop - it's only the Toshiba laptop that is problematic.

 

I reached out to Microsoft's support community as well.  Since I believe that a Windows 10 Security Update was installed a few weeks ago and the problem appeared soon after, they suggested uninstalling it and provided instructions on how to do it.  I'll try that and will report back to you.

 

Thanks,

 

Steve

 

 

 

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