Entire partition turns to gobbledigook

[jbclem]

I have a Windows 2000 computer with three hard drives, and many partitions. I also have three boots (all Win2000) on this computer. Last week I was trying to download a program from www.oldversion.com and when I clicked to download it triggered a BSOD. I restarted the computer and tried again, but another BSOD occured. I then discovered that on an unrelated (no connection to the OS boot I was working in) partition (60 GB, with 35GB free space), the entire partition was now filled with files that had nonsensical names (ie: E12fg543) and the files were full of gobbledigook. I then ran Error Check on this partition, which in turn ran diskchk when the computer rebooted. After that the partition had one Found.000 folder that was filled with File000x.chk files, 10,000 of them, taking up 99% of the entire partition. I'm assuming this partition is history, but I'd like to know if there is some miraculous way to bring these .chk files back and regain the data that was on this partition. BTW...the computer is running fine, except for the useless partition. I'm not worried about a virus, there's been no sign...I think this was a bad luck computer glitch, and there had been some previous weirdness in the naming of the partitions on this 3rd (and new) hard drive. I'd just like to know if there's a way to retrieve data from the .chk files.

 

[jbclem]

Sorry about the huge paragraph, this software apparently doesn't like me breaking it up into smaller ones.

 

[Matt1970]

There are a lot of utilities that will recover .chk files. It has been infact 10 years since I used one so I wouldn't know which one to recommend.

 

[cubby1223]

There is a reason why those .chk files are showing up.

Replace the hard drive as soon as possible, before you lose access to everything.

Computer may run fine now, but sooner or later the problems will damage files that are of great significance to Windows.

 

[jbclem]

I tried a program for recovering .chk files (deChk). Out of 10,000 files it found 7 that it could identify and then convert to the correct extension. Five of those were .gif files with no image inside. I'll try another .chk file recovery program, but it's not looking good for me. Fortunately, this was a new installation of Windows 2000 and what I will mostly lose is the time spent setting it up and re-installing some of the programs I use on the other Windows 2000 installations...this is a computer with a triple boot (all Win2000). As far as worrying about the hard drive goes...I have three hard drives on this computer, I check them regularly with the Speed Fan online hard drive check and other hard drive checking programs. The hard drive with the messed up partition is only a few months old, has always had high ratings with the tests, it's SMART attributes show hardly any deterioration. I've run Spinrite 6 on all these hard drives and it hasn't found any problems at all. One of the hard drives is old, and it's SMART attributes show this, but it's mostly a warehouse for old programs and old data that I don't need. I also tend to make copies of important data files and spread them around on the various hard drives, and also on another computer I have. So no one knows the real reason these .chk files showed up, but since they were only there after the BSOD, and after I ran dskchk, and not before...it's safe to say that 10,000 .chk files were not the result of a slowly accumulating deterioration of this almost new hard drive.

 

[jbclem]

What an annoying website software...is there a way to make it show the 4 paragraphs that were in this last reply?

 

[Bubbleawsome]

I think paragraphs work?
Another line here

Down a line. Everything looks right.

 

[jbclem]

1. If that works for you and not for me, there must be a switch somewhere to turn the paragraph function on. I haven't found it yet.

1. If I use "ordered list", that might give me artificial numbered paragraphs.

yes, this seems to work. So paragraphs with numbers is better than none at all.

Well, now I'm getting paragraphs without numbers.

 

[Steltek]

It also would be a good idea to run a MEMTEST86+ session to check your system memory. File system errors can also frequently occur as a result of a bad memory module.