How to fix issues after accidentally cleaning up stuff in your windowsfilter

They tell you never to manually remove directories, what can go wrong?

Sometimes it is good to introduce some chaos to your system, this time I intentionally removed some layers in the C:\ProgramData\Docker\image\windowsfilter\layerdb\sha256\ directory. What happens next is that Docker is not able to find the extracted layers anymore on your system. It is not able to recover from this even after a dozen of docker system prune -f commands :)

The errors appeared

When building my images I got errors like these:

failed to get layer for image sha256:96713412f5d8a571e94a4396dd656aefcf09ee91e7329ed2d5c8c3da991cf90e: layer does not exist

and

failed to register layer: rename C:\ProgramData\Docker\image\windowsfilter\layerdb\tmp\write-set-3770558273 C:\ProgramData\Docker\image\windowsfilter\layerdb\sha256\9a7c514ec82c7976c7b84909b30e88dee078b3083659f7b057b8f3316add8875: Access is denied.

How to overcome this issue?

My action resulted in a corrupted imagedb and layerdb. Next I removed the entire contents of the C:\ProgramData\Docker\image\windowsfilter directory. I then tried to build my image again, it did quite some layer pulls but it prompted me with a different error.

failed to write digest data: invalid output path: CreateFile C:\ProgramData\Docker\image\windowsfilter\imagedb\content\sha256: The system cannot find the path specified.

It is rather curious to see that Docker actually did create the directories for layerdb and distribution, but it lacked in scaffolding the imagedb directory. I just created it manually in my trusty cmd prompt.

mkdir "C:\ProgramData\Docker\image\windowsfilter\imagedb\content\sha256"

After this I was happily building my images again.

Happy coding!

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