Recently I received an email asking me how to get back .chk files created by chkdsk or scandisk? Whenever you don’t shutdown your computer properly, before Windows is booted up, you’ll be presented by a blue colored screen that will scan your disk for errors. You have a few seconds to press any key to abort the chkdsk.

Since Windows 98, I’ve been installing many types of software on my computer to test them out. We all know that Windows 98 is very unstable because whenever an application is not responding, ending the task will mostly make the Windows unstable which I can’t even reboot properly. Seems like cold reboot is the only way to restart the computer. After a cold reboot, SCANDISK will appear. Of course I let it scan thinking it can detect and fix problems after an improper reboot but I was wrong. It turned many of my important files into CHK files.

Since that incident, I NEVER allow Windows to ever again perform CHKDSK or SCANDISK to detect and fix hard drive problems by itself. If I am advised to run CHKDISK or SCANDISK, I’d make sure I have proper backup of my important files first. I never understood why Microsoft created CHKDISK or SCANDISK to fix corrupted files and then place them at the root of your drives with the name FileXXXXX.CHK? What’s the point of saving the file there when there is no built-in tool to recover back the .CHK files?

Fortunately there are third party tools that is able to help you recover .CHK files created by CHKDSK and SCANDISK.

You can simply rename all your CHK files to the desired extension and see what works. For example, if you have a Word document file went missing after scandisk, maybe renaming the .chk to .doc might be able to let you open the Word document. It’s tough to identify because there can be many Filexxxx.CHK files at the root of your drive and you don’t know which is which.

The easiest way is to use third party tools to help you check the headers of the CHK file and identify what is the original extension, then renaming it to the correct extension. All 3 free tools below does nearly the same thing and no harm using all of them to recover CHK files.

1. UnCHK by Eric Phelps

UnCHK is a free tool that is able to help you restore CHK files to the original extension. UnCHK can identify the following file types: JPG PSP PSD GIF ZIP CAB EXE DLL OCX WRI BMP DOC PPT XLS PDF RTF HTM WAV MID AVI RAR TIF MP3 WPD FPX EPS CLP. You can add more file types yourself so it can support more extensions. Just drag a good file, drop it on the program and it will read and recognize the header.

[ Download FileCHK by Martin Kratz ]

2. FileCHK by Martin Kratz

That’s right. There is no interface or options for this free tool. FileCHK will check for files named FILE????.CHK in it’s directory and rename those CHK files to the correct extension. FileCHK can identify the following file types: 3DS TIF EXE BMP SWF PSD AI GIF PST CAB RAR CHM MID PDF ZIP HLP MP3 DWG MPG LNK URL HTM JPG TTF MDB MOV QT DOC XLS RMI WAV AVI CDR TXT ASF

[ Download UnCHK by Eric Phelps ]

Note: There is a thorough comparison made by Eric between UnCHK and FileCHK.

3. CHK-Mate

CHK-Mate will examine the contents of the CHK files and determine if the contents are known filetypes, such as MS-Word files or GIF files. When contents are recognized (for example, as a Word document), the CHK files are copied to a new file with the correct file extension (Filexxxx.CHK -> Filexxxx.DOC). The new file extension allows you to easily open the file using the associated program.

If the contents of a CHK file can not be linked to a known filetype, you have the option to extract all the readable text from the CHK file. Use this option to recover information from a CHK file that is perhaps not intact enough to be recovered completely as a known filetype.

[ Download CHK-Mate ]

[tags]chkdsk, scandisk, chk, recover, restore[/tags]