This morning, my curiosity turned into a moment of slight stupidity when I ran the following command: C: cd \ echo Just testing... > :hidden.txt So I've created an Alternate Data Stream attached to the root directory of the C: drive. Question is... how do I delete it?

I don't think it was created. I did the same thing and then I used crucialads to search for it and it didn't find it.

Hi, this might make interesting reading, there is a section at the bottom for removing created streams . Quite amazing what it can actually do and the fact that not many people know it exists is worrying. http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=... Unknown has caused an error in unknown and unknown needs to restart.

Thanks Scotty, I used the streams.exe -d option and it worked. Guapo, I can assure you it's there, but perhaps Crucial ADS doesn't detect it. Perhaps it only detects ADSs attached to files, and not directories. In fact the earlier version I had (1.53) of streams.exe didn't detect it either, but the newest version (1.57) did (and deleted it successfully.)

scottyuk30: the fact that not many people know it exists is worrying. Know what's really scary? Pre-XP SP2, Task Manager wouldn't show anything running from an ADS.

ADSes have been around since NT. There is good reason why they're not highly documented or known, as you can see. :) That ADS is still taking up space on your hard drive (most likely 4 kilobytes), despite the fact that cmd.exe and other first-party XP tools won't necessarily show it. Without getting overly technical, it is as though you created a file with no name, more or less. The inode is there, but a lot of tools will ignore such "invalid" filenames. To get rid of it for good, grab a copy of Notepad from NT 4.0 (2K and XP's will NOT do the job!), open the ADS in Notepad, select all text (you will see "Just testing..." to confirm what I am saying), delete, then close Notepad. It will warn you that it can't save an empty file and it will then safely delete it for good. N.B. Just to be on the safe side in the future, it is best to only create ADSes in temporary subdirectories that you do not wish to keep. That makes cleanup a LOT easier. You can embed ADSes into executables and other things, but it's best to exercise caution.