Hi, Ed.
Ed said:
I have a new folder with 10,000 .CHK files within. Is
there any utility I can run to undo these or at least view
the contents of the files easily?
What do you mean, "easily"? Notepad will easily show you the contents of
each file, one by one. That is, it will show the ASCII contents; any
control characters or other binary content will look like garbage, of
course. If you know they are all .xls or .doc files, for example, you can
try opening each one in Excel or Word, but even then, any broken-chain files
will be missing control characters and other bits that will leave them
looking like garbage.
Unless they are extremely valuable, or mostly plain text - and not
replaceable from backup or anywhere else - you may be best advised to cut
your losses and delete the whole lot. No recovery tool that I know about
can put THIS Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Is this a FATx volume? Or NTFS? Not that it matters much. I don't know
about NTFS, but, in a FAT system, chkdsk simply finds all clusters (single
or in chains) that the FAT shows as used but for which no directory entry
exists, and creates an anonymous directory entry for it. If all chains were
intact beforehand, all you have to do (?) is look at each file, recognize
it, rename it, and move it back into its original directory. But that's a
tedious job with just a few dozen files; for 10,000, you could spend weeks
at it. :>(
RC
