Question

I recently had to reinstall Windows and had several working copies checked out. I copied these to a network share, reinstalled Windows and copied the working copy folders back to the HDD.

They are now no longer recognised by TorroiseSVN as being a working copy – no overlay icons are present and the right-click menu shows SVN Checkout instead of SVN Commit and SVN Update

All _svn directories where backed up and restored.

What has gone wrong and how can I fix it without having to checkout fresh copies? (each one is nearly 1GB)

Edit 1 Current installed TortoiseSVN is 1.7.4. The working copies would have been generated by 1.6.x and upgraded to 1.7.x. I think this is why they have _svn not .svn folders.

Edit 2 These are definitely 1.7.x working copies as there is only a single _svn folder in the root and none in sub directories

Answer 1

First: if you’re not still using VS.NET (no, not VS2002: the version before that), then do yourself a favor and do a fresh checkout. Even if each working copy is around 1GB, believe me: it’s worth it!

Otherwise, if your really don’t want a fresh checkout:
You reinstalled windows, which means you lost the SVN_ASP_DOT_NET_HACK environment variable. You can manually set that env variable and set it to 1. After a reboot, your working copies with the _svn folders instead of the .svn folders will be recognized by any svn client.