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Ok, so I am not sure why, but my USB flash drive isn't showing all of my stories that I typed and saved.

It might be because I removed the USB flash drive without ejecting it safely.

All of the data was there on my flash drive, I just couldn't see it. The capacity was almost full so I'm pretty sure the data was there.

So, when I decided to run and check to see if there were any problems, the computer found that there were. I think it found my files, but now they are CHK files and I don't know how to get them back.

Can someone please help? This is my life's work here!

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  • Have you tried renaming them to a different file extension? E.g., .txt, .doc
    – imtheman
    Jul 9, 2012 at 16:41
  • The file is corrupt. You can try to run a program to recover the data you already complicated the problem by doing having a program flag the corrupted data.
    – Ramhound
    Jul 9, 2012 at 17:21
  • Related question: What can I do with .chk files in FOUND.000 folders?
    – Synetech
    Jul 9, 2012 at 19:08

1 Answer 1

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.chk files are files recovered by the chkdsk program. They'll contain your data, but it might not be exactly in order; you'll have to open them up and try to rearrange them back into the original format. This is much easier with plaint-text files than with binary files. With luck, each .CHK file is exactly one file and just needs to be renamed. If you can't sort it out and can't find anyone who can, and they're very valuable, you should send the drive to a data recovery agency, which can massage them back into useful files.

Always either eject USB devices or set their policy to "quick removal" instead of "high permormance" (this is default in recent Windows) to prevent this. A backup solution is also very important.

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    Could you please emphasize backup a little more?
    – Ben Voigt
    Jul 9, 2012 at 19:30

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