What are you supposed to do with recovered file fragments from scandisk?

Factual Questions
1

So I blue screen, and run scandisk to make sure everything that was opened gets properly closed, indexed, etc.

It tells me that I’ve recovered file fragments that go into directories found.001 found.002 etc. The file names are file0000.chk, file0001.chk etc. They’re in multiples of 4k, represent one or a string of sectors.

First, what causes these fragments to become lost? Is it random? Were they from open files at the time of the crash?

Second, is there anything I’m supposed to actually do with these? Opening some of these, they’re plain text, but most are just random binaries. Are these now chunks randomly missing from programs that now might malfunction? Am I supposed to restore these somehow, or are they just there for my perusal?

2

  1. They may have been caused immediately by the BSOD, or they may have been lying around for months, caused by other errors.

  2. You should do what you did: look into them to see if the is anything useful to the human eye. If not, delete them. The usefulness of this feature has been declining for years as more & more files are internally mumbo-jumbo.

  3. It is unlikely that they represent hunks of programs that are now missing. Fragments are created when a write operation fails in certain unlikely ways. Program files are generally written only once at installation time. So the only programs likely to be damaged are ones whose instalaltion somehow failed. ie ones that never worked from the git-go.

TThere is some chance some program that was open at the BSOD trashed its configuration file, the one which remembers your various settings. In most cases the program will wake up & set everything to factory default when it can’t find or validate the settings file.

Bottom line: If Windows itself starts normally, you’re probably unscathed. Statistically, most of the “recovered” files were really free space, leftover chunks of long-since deleted files where the deletion didn’t work properly.

3

To make it more clear. It is there so you may recover a piece of an important data file when you don’t make backups. Trash the fragments, they do you no good.

You may wish to set it to do not save fragments.

4

read the plain text files, and figure out where they came from.
Then double check that the original file is complete. There is a very slight chance that you may find something in the fragments that you want to save.
Then, after checking, delete the fragment plain text file.