CHECKDISK reduced my drive to 0000.CHK

[Bob T]

I lost a logical drive last week. I just lost another one
today:

While in DOS I ran a SCANDISK of a logical drive in my
extended partion. This drive was next to the one that
failed last week.

Scandisk reported finding two FATs for that drive. It was
confused and suggested that the 1st was the best, and
asked if I wanted to use the 1st or 2nd FAT and make
a "restore" Floppy in case something went wrong.

--lots to say good about, good ol'DOS---

I quit SCANDISK and went to get the Floppy.

Then I had the very "unbright" idea to run the Checkdisk
option under Properties|Tools in My Computer. (It didn't
occur to me make a backup of the drive. I've never made a
backup when I've run a Check or Scandisk before--usualy
you just run the scan and it fixes everything.)

I told it to check the disk and make corrections. :-0

It made it's check and corrections.

When I looked, my drive was EMPTY,

With the exception of a new folder: "FOUND000" and
nested inside it three files: Drwtsn32.log (with lots of
info) and along with it, "found0000.chk" and
found0001.chk."

Other than that, everything is gone. converted into
****.CHK?

Is there any way I can use these files and the information
in DrWatson to return the drive to the way it was?

The Checkdisk also did some damage to the FAT32 of my
Primary drive, but that's a thread yet to come.


Bob

 

[Dave Patrick]

I doubt there's much you can do short of sending the drive to a recovery
specialist. If this logical drive is on the same physical disk as the other,
then it's probably a good indication the drive is or has failed.

What happened when you restarted the pc was chkdsk ran and found broken
chains/ lost clusters, then created *.chk files of them so you can delete
them and regain the otherwise lost drive space. They're not really meant to
be recoverable files. You can open them with a text editor and attempt to
copy the parts you need to another file.