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marsh-wiggle
Asked: 2018-11-23 06:27:23 +0800 CST

How to recognize and repair malformed shortcuts (.lnk files)?

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Problem We have lots of not working .lnk files on a Windows Server 2016.

Example: Clicking on the shortcut 91205248__Orig.lnk causes the error:

Problem with shortcut - the drive or network ....

enter image description here

What I found out

  • The .lnk file can be edited in explorer
  • The stored path is correct "R:\my subfolders\Fallordner 2012\91205248"
  • After cutting out and saving the same path again the .lnk works
  • Size not working .lnk files: 15kb
  • Size working .lnk (after resaving): 2kb

Tracing with sysinternals procmon.exe

Working .lnk file:

enter image description here

Not working .lnk file:

enter image description here

Size changes after re-saving

15 kb = not working original

enter image description here

History

The system is migrated from Windows 2008 R2 file server / terminal server to server 2016 file server / terminal server

Questions

  • How can malformed .lnk files be recognized?
  • Is there any way to fix it (except manually opening and saving each .lnk file again)?

Edit
 .lnk files are no text files, so simple search / replace operations won't work.

Edit2
 I hesitate to perform a bulk operation and rewrite all paths in the .lnk files (as described here: Modify shortcut file (.lnk) target path using Powershell). So I hope there is somebody who faced a similar problem and solved successfully.

windows-server-2008-r2

1 Answers

  1. .lnk files are just text files.

    Open both the working and non-working lnk files in a text editor and see if there is a difference in the format.

    If there is, use unix text tools to recursively change all the non-working files to match the format of the working files.

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