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Recently I was asked to talk to a group about some work I did 20 years ago. I've had to go to backup CDs to get content. The company worked on Macs and many of the filenames have illegal characters in them. For example there's a file named cos2r<sin3theta.tiff.

When I try to copy these files I get an error saying, "The file name you specified is not valid or too long. Specify a different file name." I can't get past that.

Does anyone know of a way I can copy them?

Updates I'm on Windows 10, but I also tried on Windows XP. The CD file system is CDFS

ITGirl
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2 Answers2

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Windows actually still maintains the old 8-dot-3 naming scheme as an alternative to the long filename. This may allow you to access rename or manipulate files with problematic characters.

At the windows command line, you can identify the 8.3 name using the /X parameter for dir. In my user profile, for example, Saved Games folder is SAVEDG~1.

So dir /X cos*.*, check the short-format filename, and then ren {short name} {new legal name}

Yorik
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You should be able to do it creating an ISO from the CD and then using an ISO editor/extractor for renaming/extracting the files:

  • First create and ISO file from the CD, for example using the free ImgBurn (beware of misleading ads, the real download links are those name Mirror X):

    ImgBurn - Create image from disc

  • Then use an ISO editor/extractor, there are a lot of ISO extractors but the important thing is using one that allows renaming files, either in the ISO or when extracting them, I used the free WinISO 5.3 (note that the free version is only 5.3, in the ZIP there are two installers, use WinISO53.exe and the register with the key provided in readme.txt), I created a test ISO with invalid characters and WinISO processed it fine:

    WinISO - rename file

    First use Rename with the files that have invalid characters and then use Extract... to save that files to a folder. Another option is renaming all the files with invalid characters, save the ISO and burn it in another CD or use it with a virtual CD drive.

Alberto Martinez
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