[ultragizmo]

Hi, chkdsk ran on one of my hard drives, it's a WD 250 GB internal drive, and when it was done instead of my Files folder I had a found.000 folder with three dir000x.chk folders inside. Inside each dir0000.chk folder are all my files. They all appear with the correct name, time stamp, size, etc., but when I try to open them I get errors. For example, WinZip says the file is corrupt when opening a zip file, or Windows Media can't play an mp3.

Is there any hope of recovering these files?

Thanks very much in advance.

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those are actually file fragments, not files. chkdsk attempted to recover them, but failed, it seems.

I doubt very much you will recover a compressed disk, but you can sometimes recover documents by opening them in notepad

Those files were already damaged.

[gerryf]

those are actually file fragments, not files. chkdsk attempted to recover them, but failed, it seems.

I doubt very much you will recover a compressed disk, but you can sometimes recover documents by opening them in notepad

Those files were already damaged.

[ultragizmo]

Hmm, that's bad news.

So even though they are all named and sized correctly they are actually file fragments? Does that mean that the data is there somewhere it's just been jumbled around?

When I open a zip file in Notepad it has various recognizable pieces of information. For example, it starts with PK, has some characters, then the zip file's proper filename, then many lines of random looking characters, followed again by the name of the file. Does that indicate that the data is still there?

It's just strange to me that outwardly it seems like everything is fine.

Thanks again.

[ultragizmo]

Just a follow-up. I was able to recover about 99% of these files. It seems the files would appear corrupted using the original computer but I used a newer computer and updated the BIOS; almost all the files were okay after that.

So if your files become corrupt after a chkdsk and you're using an older computer try updating the BIOS and/or use a newer computer.