Disk Consistency Check

[Stephen Coates]

Windows XP decided the other week that it needed to do a consistency check on my 120GB IDE drive. I put it off for a week or so, knowing that it would take a long time. But then I accidentally forgot to skip it, so I left it for just over an hour to do its check and read some Open University prospectuses while I was waiting.

It found several problems. I can't remember what the problems were, but one of them was with the directory 'D:\picasa\' which contains loads of photographs and the other was with 'D:\WorkFiles\stuff\' which contains several gigabytes of crap from between 2006 and 2009.

It converted these directories to files (so now it is 'D:\WorkFiles\stuff') but the file is only a few kilobytes. The data from these directories (and other data which I haven't mentioned) is now in 'D:\FOUND.000\FILExxxx.CHK'. There are 10000 files in this directory (about 3GB worth).

The Windows 'Disk Cleanup' programme thinks these are pointless old chkdisk files and can free up 3GB of space by removing them. Obviously Windows can't do much with them since they are all .CHK files, but Linux identifies them by the actual file type and hence can easily determine which are which, such as PDFs, JPEGs, MP3s etc.

Does anyone know why Windows has put the files in FOUND.000 and why it thinks the files can be deleted? These files are no where else to be found on the disk.