Certain folders greyed out in finder

I have the same problem in a DFS volume (network files connected over SMB) and then replicated to another server. It seems that this occurs randomly. Windows machines can interact with the files fine, but on the OSX machines that i have tried, they all say something like "the operation can't be completed because the item "item name" is in use.".

After a few days, the error will go away and osx users will be able to acces the files.

These are random files or folders. Well random in that i havent found a correlation. Also the folders are all full control for the group that the osx user is in and i have also taken ownership by that user.

i am just looking around everywhere for solutions that have to do with grayed or ghosted out network files and happened upon this. I guess there is no solution here.

I'm late to answer but I had a similar issue with my folders and I spoke to a colleague and he suggested I look at the Date Created heading in Windows Explorer (Choose Details View and add the colums by right clicking on any of the Headings). Check to see if there are any dates that are in the future, this wil be why the Finder isn't registering what it sees. Correct this on the Folders and files and the grey should go away once you refresh the window.

You can use any Batch Renaming utility that looks at the Attributes of Directories and files. The util I used is BulkFileChanger by NirSoft. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bulk_file_changer.html

Try it and let me know what you think.

Blackstarr30, your suggestion worked perfectly for me on OSX 10.7.2 - I had a similar problem to another poster where I was copying folders/files and the process got interrupted. Using the that freeware utility on the windows machine to edit the created date attributes solved everything!

Thanks!

I had this problem, but it wasn't the creation date. It was on a windows server which I didn't have admin access to. To fix it I created a new directory in my original folder (the new directory is called "fixed" in the example below) and used the command-line "cat" utility to copy the data out of each file into a new one with the same name, in the new directory.

Here's the command:

cd /the/path/to/your/problem/files

mkdir fixed

for i in *.* ; do

cat "$i" > "fixed/$i"

done

It did the tricky. I was having the same problem with files greayd out into a folder I once had permissions. It was a folder created by Windows. Thanks st!b for your tip! Now the files are really unlocked and I can copy and edit them!

I had this problem- I had a greyed out folder that I couldn't access by double clicking. From the get info window I could see that the creation date on it was 1984, so presumably this was why.

I got round it by opening the folder with "Go To Folder" command from the finder. Once I was in there I was able to copy the contents into a fresh folder.

I had the same problem with files on my NAS - Synology Diskstation. However, part of the problem in my case seemed to stem from how I connected to the Diskstation. In the first instance where I noticed the problem initially, I was connected to my Diskstation via "afp". In that case, the files were greyed out and could not be accessed. When I connected to the same folder on the Diskstation from another computer, which connected by "smb" there were no issues at all. I tried to recreate the "smb" connection on the first computer, and voila - no greyed out files. I don't know if this helps others, but it gave me a sigh of relief.

Had the same problem but found that if you compress the file using Archive Utility and then decompress the .zip file it fixes itself!

Hope that helps

Had the same problem when copying to external drive, turn out that my folder date is 1984 so i used File Date Changer 5, to change the date. http://www.publicspace.net/FileDateChanger/

And it worked...

This worked for me, thanks.

As a side note, the greyed out folder also had a 1984 date.

This also worked for my 1984 file.

I got my 1984 file when transfering information from a portable hard drive that had been set up on PC to Mac.

Thanks Guys.

File Date Changer worked for me too. Got the 1984 date error to my iphoto liberary file when I've copied it form external drive.

Thanks!!