Check Disk

[Megladon]

I have a external USB hard drive that I use to store a
lot of file that I like to bring with me from place to
place. Some of these files are MP3 files, some are jpeg
files, and some are Service Packs. I have a variety of
files that are on the drive. I was in the process of
copying files (basically overrighting the whole
directory) with newer files and the battery died sometime
during the process. I now have some curruption on the
drive. I ran scan disk and it added a new directory to
the root of the drive. The directory name is:FOUND.000.
In the directory I found 1,245 chk files. My questions
are:

1. Can my currupt files be repaired using these chk files?
2. Is there a way to tell what file the chk was generated
from (which MP3 is currupt)?
3. What should I do with all of these chk files?

 

[Tom Swift]

Your questions are good ones. The .chk files are bits and pieces of files
that XP's Disk Error Checking has found. There is no way to automatically
reconstruct your pre-exisiting files from these bits and pieces,
unfortunately. The only thing you can do with .chk files is to open each one
individually (with a file viewer like NotePad or QuickView) and salvage what
information you can. The bits and pieces of a multimedia file (.jpeg, for
example) cannot be combined into a complete .jpeg file, even if you could
correctly identify all the pieces of the file.

Once you have salvaged what you can from .chk files, the only other thing to
do with them is to delete them. Hope you made backups on CDs or DVDs. This
is a good example, unfortunately, of the need to have multiple layers of
security.

Tom Swift