From: glad@ac.dal.ca
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject: Re: What to do with file0000.chk?
Date: 15 Dec 92 01:23:04 -0400
Organization: Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

> I got "Serrious disk problem" from within Windows ocassionally. Then I reboot
>  the machine. CHKDSK showed lost chains, I used chkdsk/f to recover 
> them into files. But when I type file0000.chk, sometimes I can see some
> binary codes, sometmes I got "error reading drive C" message. No bad sector
> is show on chkdsk.
> 
> Does that mean file0000.chk is on bad sectors? If true, would  keeping the 
> junk file there prevent getting into the bad sectors?
> 

If you are running Windows at the time when you reboot the machine without
exiting Windows first, you will end up leaving files open on your disk that
Windows uses while it is running (swap files) and erases when exited normally.
So, if you reboot while the files are still open, CHKDSK will report "...lost
allocation units..." when it encounters these files.  You should try to avoid
rebooting when you can exit from an application normally, however, the files
are likely to be swap files that Windows uses for virtual memory management, in
which case they are not important.  When you run chkdsk/f it will convert all
lost chains to files and save them in the current directory so that you can
peruse them to see if they contain anything useful, but it's up to you to 
extract that information from the filexxxx.chk if needed.  If you are getting
disk errors consistently, I would get a utility such as Norton's Disk Doctor
to diagnose problem areas of the disk which does a more comprehensive job
than chkdsk does.  Disk Doctor will often be able to recover any corrupted
files also.  Finally, if there are bad sectors on your disk, Disk Doctor
will report them and mark them as "bad" so they will not be used again. CHKDSK
is supposed to do this as well, but doesn't always work.  Try typing chkdsk
and it will report any bad sectors with "nnnn bytes in bad sectors" if there
are any.

--
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