Windows XP decided the other week that it needed to do a consistency check on my 120GB IDE drive. I put it off for a week or so, knowing that it would take a long time. But then I accidentally forgot to skip it, so I left it for just over an hour to do its check and read some Open University prospectuses while I was waiting.

It found several problems. I can't remember what the problems were, but one of them was with the directory 'D:\picasa\' which contains loads of photographs and the other was with 'D:\WorkFiles\stuff\' which contains several gigabytes of crap from between 2006 and 2009.

It converted these directories to files (so now it is 'D:\WorkFiles\stuff') but the file is only a few kilobytes. The data from these directories (and other data which I haven't mentioned) is now in 'D:\FOUND.000\FILExxxx.CHK'. There are 10000 files in this directory (about 3GB worth).

The Windows 'Disk Cleanup' programme thinks these are pointless old chkdisk files and can free up 3GB of space by removing them. Obviously Windows can't do much with them since they are all .CHK files, but Linux identifies them by the actual file type and hence can easily determine which are which, such as PDFs, JPEGs, MP3s etc.

Does anyone know why Windows has put the files in FOUND.000 and why it thinks the files can be deleted? These files are no where else to be found on the disk.


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Windows does this when files have unrecoverable corruption and cannot read them correctly.

This is also an issue that FAT32 formatted partitions seem to create, and NTFS ones don't. Well, I never encountered it with NTFS anyway.
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I suppose I will have to sort out all the files manually.

The old Windows 2000 system did a consistency check on the same disk not too long ago (maybe last year) and I don't think it did anything.
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I wrote an app a few years ago that scans the headers of the files named *.chk and renames the file extension for known formats - so at least you can get any pictures/vids/mp3/docs back. Please find attached.

It's written as a macro in VBA in Excel, and I only wrote it to recover stuff when the same happened to me, so you may need to go into the VB back-end and change hardcoded paths. It also supports Amiga files such as .library, and strips off the gunk from the end of files for jpg, html and mp3 so you don't get any extra noise added from the chkdsk process (it usually recovers the whole cluster which is why your new filesizes are divisible by 8, since chkdsk doesn't know where your file stops, meaning it adds extra noise past the EOF marker).

I had a quick look at the code and you'll need to call it manually, by running the sub recFls("root",0), after you've changed the paths and folCnt to match the number of FOUND folders you have.
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Thanks. I'll have a fiddle with it. I guess I'll have to install Visual Basic and MS Office.

Fortunately, the files are easy to identify in Linux because it doesn't use the file extension and just tells me what it is.

It did another consistency check the other day and made a FOUND.001 directory containing another 10000 files. Looks mostly like clipart.

I remember at the end of the check it complained about lack of space on the disk.
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