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Comment on Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware?parent

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OT a bit but what are you meant to do with those CHK files? Is there anything to show what they are or recover anything from them? Otherwise what's the point?

You could edit them and decide to delete them (most of the time) or rename them and get back some content (for text files at least).

Those files were created by chkdsk from orphan files (with no entry point in the directories) in the File Allocation Table (the table that gives the "FAT" name to the filesystem). After chkdsk, the filesystem was consistent again.

Such orphans appeared when the OS crashed or the system went off during file writing operations. Of course when that happened while writing on a compressed filesystem, the problem was not a lost file but a corruption. Sometimes the compressed filesystem was just entirely lost.

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