Chkdsk ate my drive

[Bob T]

My HD is/has failed. FAT32.

I ran from DOS a scandisk on a logical drive, just to make
sure it was ok.

Scandisk told me that there were two FATs, with one
looking better than the other & gave me the option of
using recovering from either, as well as making a
backup/restore floppy in case something went wrong.

I went to get a disk to do the backup on.

Then I had the idea to run "chkdsk" from Windows and see
what it said.

Unfortunately, I didn't notice that the /f switch was on.

Chkdsk ran, popped up that it was fixing files and then i
saw what looked like ALL folders & files on that drive
flash by.

After chkdsk had finished, I looked at the drive & sure
enough, all that shows on it are two files 0000.chk &
0001.chk, with a drwtsn. The two files are about 800 megs
in size.

How do I undo what chkdsk did and put things back? At
least before it ran, even though there were errors, the
drive could be read & written to. Now all I have is
nearly a gig. of "file fragments."

if it turns out that I can't undo or restore from the
chkdsk, what good is it? I understand that it "fixes"
problems, but what good are the *.chk files? They contain
file fragments? But how does one get to them?

Bob

 

[Dave Patrick]

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 go ahead and delete the files to regain the
lost space. You can open them with a text editor and attempt to copy the
parts you need to another file.

 

[Joep]

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 go ahead and delete the files to regain the
lost space. You can open them with a text editor and attempt to copy the
parts you need to another file.


--
Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft MVP [Windows NT/2000 Operating Systems]

My HD is/has failed. FAT32.

I ran from DOS a scandisk on a logical drive, just to make
sure it was ok.

Scandisk told me that there were two FATs, with one
looking better than the other & gave me the option of
using recovering from either, as well as making a
backup/restore floppy in case something went wrong.

I went to get a disk to do the backup on.

Then I had the idea to run "chkdsk" from Windows and see
what it said.

Unfortunately, I didn't notice that the /f switch was on.

Chkdsk ran, popped up that it was fixing files and then i
saw what looked like ALL folders & files on that drive
flash by.

After chkdsk had finished, I looked at the drive & sure
enough, all that shows on it are two files 0000.chk &
0001.chk, with a drwtsn. The two files are about 800 megs
in size.

How do I undo what chkdsk did and put things back? At
least before it ran, even though there were errors, the
drive could be read & written to. Now all I have is
nearly a gig. of "file fragments."

if it turns out that I can't undo or restore from the
chkdsk, what good is it? I understand that it "fixes"
problems, but what good are the *.chk files? They contain
file fragments? But how does one get to them?

Bob

Try:

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/chkmate.htm