How do I unlock svn?

This probably means your working copy is locked. Please provide the full error message for further analysis.

A locked working copy will result if you force-terminate an svn command or the command errors out uncleanly.

The quick fix is to run svn cleanup. This normally fixes broken working copies.

you can also go into the .svn directories and remove the lock file.

SVN does have a lock feature, but likely you didn't use that. If you did you just need to unlock first.

Perhaps you should just delete (or move to your desktop) the locked folder and then do an svn update to fetch the latest folder.

If you have changes you can copy them back in by first deleting the .svn folders in your copied folder and then pasting on top of the newly checked out files.

Normally an svn clean will fix these things but I've seen sometimes where I had no other choice but to do the above.

(Note: close visual studio before you do this)

You can break lock via GUI or command line: svn unlock --force

Example: svn unlock --force *.java

Refer: http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/nightly/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-automation.html

In some situations you can delete the locked directory, then do an update to restore it (thus removing the lock).