The RubeTube

(Skip ahead three paragraphs down if you don't care about the back-story.)

This edition of TechBits involves a very scary episode with the backups that I made from my dead office laptop's hard disk. I couldn't open one of the backup folders so I decided to run Chkdsk to check for errors on the external drive; it found a number of errors, but nothing that couldn't be fixed.

After running Chkdsk, I could finally access the inaccessible backup folder, but I ran into a bigger problem: the entire folder of videos I had stored on my external hard disk was gone! 100+ GB of downloaded animé and TV episodes, gone in a flash! (I also lost entire folders of work-related files, but strangely enough, I was more concerned about the "Videos" folder.)

I found out some time later by checking the properties window that the missing files were still taking up space on the hard disk; I just couldn't find them! I did my research and it turns out that Chkdsk was the culprit; it had hidden the recovered file fragments somewhere. Here's how to find them:

1. From any Explorer window, go to the Tools menu and select Folder Options.
2. From the Folder Options window, go to the View tab.
3. Under Advanced settings, make sure that the Hide protected operating system files option is unchecked:
   
   
   
4. Go to the root folder of the hard drive, (e.g., G:\). There you will find a previously-hidden folder or a series of folders named found.NNN, where NNN is some three-digit number. You might have many of these folders if you've run Chkdsk multiple times before. In my case, since I only had one Chkdsk recovery operation, I only had a found.000 folder.
5. Under the found.NNN folder, you'll find a series of folders named dirNNNN.chk, where NNNN is some four-digit number. You might also find a similar series of files called fileNNNN.chk. These are the files and folders that Chkdsk has recovered:
   
   
   
6. The files in the dirNNNN.chk folders should still be intact and properly named. You should be able to figure out from its contents what the dirNNNN.chk folder originally was and where it was originally located. Copy/move the folder back to where it should belong.
7. As for the fileNNNN.chk files, you'll just have to figure out on your own what they originally were. A free tool called CHK-Mate can examine the content of these files and determine what type of file it originally was (e.g., .doc Word document) so that you can open the file in the appropriate program and put it where it's supposed to belong. (Unfortunately, CHK-Mate wasn't able to identify what my file0000.chk was, but it's okay since it probably wasn't important.)
   

I still shudder at the thought of downloading all those videos again. Fortunately, I didn't have to. I wish Chkdsk was a bit more informative about where it hid my files though.

Labels: Chkdsk, TechBits, troubleshooting