Scandisk on every startup

So if I have a CHK file on my C drive that's 2MB should I panic now or just wait for the lights to go out? Created 26th April after a scandisk. yes I had it set to auto-fix.

Alicia

 

Has anyone filed a 'missing persons' on Harpost?

Wasn't around when this post started. Autofixing is analogous to instructing a registry cleaner not to bother us but just delete any 'invalid' entries it finds. Could get away with it for quite a while then one day all hell breaks loose when you run app X, or whatever, and then wish you had more than five registry backups because they all have the same entries missing.

If you have scandisk.ini as per the Win98_50.cab file then you have a time bomb waiting to go off.

 

Alicia J, you can delete the CHK file, scandisk created that file from the 'lost file clusters' it found. It does that in case that is something you may have wanted. In most cases if it was a file, it would be difficult to recover, as the clusters were 'lost' to begin with.
As for the discussion going on here, they are both right, depending on the person's needs and experience at the moment. I will say that if I want to just check for bad file clusters, the dos version is the way to go [ducking my head].

 

So much to learn. Perhaps I won't checkmark autofix. I don't know much about using DOS so windows based scandisk is my best option. I didn't know you could recover CHK files. I get the impression it would be complicated. No way of viewing what's in them?

Alicia

 

You could open it with Wordpad, as 2mb is too large for Notepad to open. You will see a lot of gibberish, any plain text would be readable. You can change the options of Windows scandisk so that when it finds lost file clusters it will delete them, rather than converting to a file. Your choice. I chose to delete.
Lost file clusters usually are created when you have to do a reset because of a crash, and could be nothing but temp files anyway. Unless, you are working on something at the time and was in the middle of saving it when the crash occured. It is complicated to recover, as you must have some idea of what it was to begin with. If you aren't missing anything, nothing is lost.

 

Thanks for explaining how lost file clusters are created Mark. I appreciate your input. I will delete my CHK files collected.

Alicia