Gigantic undeletable files, dated in the future

[Honey Parker]

Hello, I wonder if anyone can help with a disaster that has befallen
music files on an external hard drive. I am using Windows XP2.

An unknown cause seems to have renamed directories and classified them
as files - I figure they were previously directories because of their
size, around 2 GB (3 million KB or so, revealing my relative innocence
of technology, 15 or so files this size). The files they have become
have no file type and names such a 1, f or Q3d3. They have modified
dates in the future eg 2018 and 2021, no created dates.

They cannot be deleted as they cannot be read from the source file or
disc. KillBox finds them to not exist. There are also several file
folders similarly undeletable but no size and no dates at all. If they
cannot be restored to their previous status of music files which seems
unlikely, it would be great to get rid of them, the drive is still OK.

Wishing and Hoping

Honey Parker

 

[philo]

Hello, I wonder if anyone can help with a disaster that has befallen
music files on an external hard drive. I am using Windows XP2.

An unknown cause seems to have renamed directories and classified them
as files - I figure they were previously directories because of their
size, around 2 GB (3 million KB or so, revealing my relative innocence
of technology, 15 or so files this size). The files they have become
have no file type and names such a 1, f or Q3d3. They have modified
dates in the future eg 2018 and 2021, no created dates.

They cannot be deleted as they cannot be read from the source file or
disc. KillBox finds them to not exist. There are also several file
folders similarly undeletable but no size and no dates at all. If they
cannot be restored to their previous status of music files which seems
unlikely, it would be great to get rid of them, the drive is still OK.

Wishing and Hoping

Honey Parker

first backup whatever you can

then run chkdsk /f on the drive

 

[Honey Parker]

Thanks, I'll try it.

 

[Tim Slattery]

Hello, I wonder if anyone can help with a disaster that has befallen
music files on an external hard drive. I am using Windows XP2.

An unknown cause seems to have renamed directories and classified them
as files - I figure they were previously directories because of their
size, around 2 GB (3 million KB or so,

I know this is a quibble, but it's extremely unlikely that these
things were ever directories. A directory is a special type of file,
but generally a rather small one. It contains entries for each file or
subdirectory in the directory. Each entry consists of the file or
subdir's name, some time stamps (created, modified, accessed),
property flags, and some kind of pointer to its actual location on the
disk (varies according to the file system being used). Even if there
were thousands of files and subdirs, this would end up being in the
tens of megabytes, nowhere near the gigabytes you're talking about.

Apparently you're thinking that all the files in the directory have
been concatenated together into one huge blob. I suppose that's
possible but it wouldn't be simple. Whatever caused these things to
appear, it's not likely that they are mutated directories.

 

[Ididit]

Hello, I wonder if anyone can help with a disaster that has befallen
music files on an external hard drive. I am using Windows XP2.

An unknown cause seems to have renamed directories and classified them
as files - I figure they were previously directories because of their
size, around 2 GB (3 million KB or so, revealing my relative innocence
of technology, 15 or so files this size). The files they have become
have no file type and names such a 1, f or Q3d3. They have modified
dates in the future eg 2018 and 2021, no created dates.

They cannot be deleted as they cannot be read from the source file or
disc. KillBox finds them to not exist. There are also several file
folders similarly undeletable but no size and no dates at all. If they
cannot be restored to their previous status of music files which seems
unlikely, it would be great to get rid of them, the drive is still OK.

Wishing and Hoping

Honey Parker

I'm just guessing, but it almost looks like the external drive maybe was
doing compression of files behind the scenes and now it isn't. I have no
experience with external hard drives, but maybe some of the drives software
got un-installed?

 

[Guest]

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ybselgol