Unreadable drive after using chkdsk

[Metanis]

CHKDSK is a great tool for fixing LOGICAL problems with FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file allocations where your data is either replaceable or protected with a backup! These problems are very rare with modern computers and Windows. I mostly only see them related to thunderstorms and power blips or operator error like yanking a power cable or killing a power strip.

CHKDSK can be death to the data on a failing drive with hardware issues. The software engineers who designed CHKDSK understood this which is one of the reasons the default command is read-only reporting.

Just don't run it with /f or /r switches until you've used other tools to verify the drive's hardware. Tools like SMART and even the Windows Event Log can inform you of potential hardware issues.

 

[GTP]

Actually, chdsk will drop entire folder trees and rename other files in a found.000 folder.

Which I often find on many computers, external HDD's, thumbdrives etc.
I've even found them on my own PC's when for inexplicable reasons chkdsk decides to randomly kick in at bootup after frustration at finding some weird thing happening on the PC leads to a manual reboot.

Client PC's can have lots of them named "found.000," "found.001," "found.002," etc.
So am I wrong to assume Windows is automagically inducing chkdsk when it thinks there is something amiss?

On every occasion Windows boots and performs normally afterwards. Checking the drives with a "SMART" tool indicates all good mostly but sometimes indicates the drive has issues (client PC's)

 

[GTP]

These problems are very rare with modern computers and Windows.

With all due respect, this is not my experience at all.
As Windows evolves so does the weirdness's that I experience across the board.
Admittedly, some (or maybe much) of the file corruption is caused by the poorly written garbage people install on their PC's or the "tinkering" that clients emphatically deny ever doing.

I'm not sure "Winrot" is still a thing but earlier versions of Windows were cursed by it.

 

[fincoder]

And yes, I always imaged first... So I must be unique in the IT world.

I though that was the whole point of the posts about chkdsk: Don't run chkdsk without imaging first. I don't think anyone in this thread said chkdsk has no uses.

The main issue with chkdsk is that amateurs (and unfortunately Windows) think it's the first step if you have file corruption. Maybe it's legacy thinking from the old days when drive hardware problems were rare, and when a bad sector was nothing to worry about. These days a bad sector means they will multiply until failure.

So am I wrong to assume Windows is automagically inducing chkdsk when it thinks there is something amiss?

You're not wrong. Everyone has seen Windows check the filesystem on startup, say after an unexpected power off. That's the OS invoking chkdsk automatically. As I said above, it might have been a sound policy 15 years ago, but not these days. Microsoft is not always right!