How to repair obstructed directories in working copies

I renamed the conflicting folder and ran an SVN update to restore the folder from SVN.

After diffing with my favorite diff tool (Synchronize directories in Total Commander), i see that the only difference was that the conflicting folder had an .svn folder in it.

Sorry, but you can't repair what's lost.

The folders are gone, and they can't just be recreated out of thin air. The only way to get them back again is to run an update, but that requires that the whole folders are first removed since an update doesn't overwrite existing files.