Check Mate
Earlier, I plugged a USB drive in and was notified that some files were corrupt and needed to be repaired. Alright, I will let Windows scan and automatically repair the errors. No big deal right? The Scandisk or Chkdsk utilities will repair the problems.
Wrong! The utilities will save the contents of lost or inconsistent clusters to .CHK files in a found.nnn folder. Fine, but how does one examine the contents of the files? Windows does NOT provide a native utility to view or manage .CHK files.
Nice oversight Micro$oft! If the utilities had not "repaired" thousands of files, I would not have given this a second thought. Instead, I need to check the contents of each .CHK file and restore as needed. There might be some important stuff in there.
Google to the rescue. A search for keywords, ".CHK Files" did the trick. I found a couple of handy dandy utilities, which allow one to recover the contents of .CHK files. Below is a short list of utilities, but there may be others out there. Nice!