How to recover 'Found.nnn' files created by chkdsk

Can anybody suggest how to recover the original names for the directory structure and associated files which chkdsk 'recovered' and renamed to "FOUND.nnn" for the directory and "FILEnnn" for the files? It is a FAT volume.
Had to do a hard reset and chkdsk took a dislike to the user directory under 'Documents and Settings' so it's either get the 16,847 filenames back or rebuild the entire system.

 

Can't be done. Take a look Here for a good explanation of why if you want detail. Briefly, the chains(character strings) got saved as filennnn.chk or foundnnnn.chk because the FAT (file allocation table) had no idea what file/folder they belonged to.

Unscrambling an egg would be somewhat easier.

And I really suggest you take a look at the page. Great information that you may need in the future.

 

See what you mean. Scrambled eggs masquerading as a dog's breakfast........

With the help of backups and a HEX editor have eventually managed to recover most of what I needed onto a reformatted clean install of 2K. but what a pain. By the time you install 2k, SP2, security updates, IE6, office Prof, it's service packs and all the other applications let alone reloaded any data you are an old man. Then there's the outlook PST file and all the account info. How MS can get to version 9 of a major tool and still not have a method of backing up and recovering data is beyond comprehension.

Anyway, wasn't meant to be a soapbox reply - just a thank you for taking the time to share your expertise.

 

Suggestion - get Ghost or a similar image backup program and flash a copy of your system. Do another whenever you have made enough changes that you don't want to lose.

That way, if you have a problem, you can just restore from the ghost and have your exact system (at the time of the ghost obviously) back up and running.

I bought the Norton Internet Serurity Suite for Ghost and had all the other stuff (AV, firewall, faxing, disk defrag that is lots better than the 2K one) and so on as bonuses.