Monday, September 08, 2008

That DOS knowledge still comes in handy: CHKDSK saves the day

Last year we had a power outage and our home desktop computer crashed, and I could no longer bring up the Windows operating system on it.

I thought the machine was completely hosed, but I put the main drive into a USB enclosure that we borrowed from a friend, and connected it to a laptop, and ran a
chkdsk \f
command on the drive, from the DOS prompt.

The command found a bunch of lost chains on the disk, and fixed them, and afterwards, I was able to reinstall the drive and boot it normally. Everything was fine.

Not only that, but I found some e-mail files that had been "lost" before. I assume the chkdsk command recovered those.

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