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Topic: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files! (Read 2167 times) previous topic - next topic
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Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Hi there!
So firstly - yes, I didn't make a backup copy of my collection for some time now, and this one's my bad.
I had some power outage issues in my hood in the past week. I run Windows 10 chkdsk precautionarily few moments ago. It returned info about some corrupted .flac and .mp4 files - ckeck.txt included. Notice, that only multimedia files were flagged, no system files, no nothing else. Furthermore, I can't recall listening to/accessing these for well over month or longer.
Anyway, I did accept having them fixed by chkdsk immediately after the search for errrors round - report of made repairs saved in repair.txt. After that I run foobar to verify if there are any audible artifacts in the files. I was petrified to find out that the 'repaired' files are no longer readable. I've tried to include one of those .flac files here to scrutinise, but now I see there's nothing to upload - it's 0 KB in size.
Please tell me if there's a fix for this dealt damage!

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #1 –
I never used the /spotfix option with chkdsk...  is there any particular reason why you did ?

If I'm not mistaken, chkdsk /spotfix tries to repair errors in-place and a system reboot is mandatory.

If they are still corrupted after a reboot, maybe chkdsk /F or /R can find and recover the corrupted files.

Good luck!

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #2 –
I store music (along with some bloaty games and work-related sodtware) on a HDD that's separate from system-populated SSD. Therefore no reboot was needed nor boot-time chkdsk run option even provided. After error-check, I was given an option to apply repairs and it just run immidietely allowing to use windows along the process.
I will try your suggestions, as soon as I'm back home (3 hrs perhaps). I'll try Recuva perhaps as well - the data must be still there. Gotta read about this NTFS file's 'sparse' flag/attribute… maybe it can be 'unchecked'.

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #3 –
I think, the reboot is needed for making the system aware of those "on-the-fly" filesystem changes and I was under the impression that after using /spotfix, the user is prompted to reboot the system.

Do you still have the complete repair log around ?
The one you posted ends with record 55 of 227....

Recuva is nice, but if it doesn't find the files, you could try https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #4 –
Seems like record 55 is indeed the last one - beside files mentioned in the log, no other on this drive bear modification time stamp of around the chdsk event. Recuva didn't do anything either as it considers corrupted files as null-byte, but otherwise valid (MFT records only, I suppose). Of course, I did reboot it, but it made no difference.
Well, this is one sad lesson for me. Now I've already copied my files, music incl. to a backup HDD, I'll set up scheduled backups later this week. I set a
Code: [Select]
readonly
attribute for this volume via
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diskpart
CLI, to save it from overwritting. I will paste here a solution to my problem as soon as I find one working in my case.

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #5 –
The files were working fine after power outages and before chkdsk? Is it NTFS?

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #6 –
Yes, the files were ok before chkdsk. A bunch of untagged files in playlists would certainly drew my attention.
And yes, it is NTFS.

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #7 –
Sparse files are partially empty files for which disk space is allocated only for the non-empty content. For example when you download a 4GB movie, application may create a sparse file so at beginning it doesn't occupy 4GB - it increases allocation along with downloaded content (even if it is non-continuous). No idea why complete files would be sparse though. See if there are no recovered files in hidden/system folders in root of your disk and C.

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #8 –
Quote from: gogodance on
Yes, the files were ok before chkdsk. A bunch of untagged files in playlists would certainly drew my attention.
And yes, it is NTFS.

Are you actually SURE these were OK? You said you haven't played them for quite some time. Your player might've kept cached tag data for these. You had filesystem errors, checkdisk didn't corrupt the files - it just couldn't fix the errors.
Error 404; signature server not available.

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #9 –
Quote from: rutra80 on
Sparse files are partially empty files for which disk space is allocated only for the non-empty content. For example when you download a 4GB movie…
Well, the "Whoa, Nelly!" album was CDDA-ripped to .flac by me personally some decade ago from my wife's (then gf) CD and it's been on the affected drive for at least 4-5 yrs. The latest mp3-CD for my wife's car with this album included is exactly 2019-10-24 and the converted mp3's bear no errors - checked with 'foo_verifier' and listening through with spectrogram ahead).

Re: Windows' chkdsk corrupted my music files!

Reply #11 –
You said you used Recurva to find the files. Did you enable Deep Scan"? It does a more in depth scan.  Also as     Maggi suggested, try TestDisk. It has recovered files for me that other programs couldn't.

Glass half full!
 
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