Well, ain’t that a fine kettle of CHKDSKy fish?

Ugh.

I got a couple of “you need to run CHKDSK” errors the other day. Didn’t get a chance to do anything about it, but, well, these things happen.

Then today (ironically, after getting my work machine with its Win7 upgrade which worked without a problem) I came home and … well, I have a whole bunch of applications complaining about bad files and “you need to run CHKDSK” errors.

Well, fine.  I’ll run CHKDSK.

Um …

So, of course, another fifteen minutes of fiddling with CHKDSK ensues and … well, I have to restart the machine and have it automatically run then.

Except, of course, then it wasn’t working.  It would give me a “okay, going to run CHKDSK” message during boot-up.  Except then it wouldn’t.

Eventually found a Microsoft hotfix listed for solving the problem of CHKDSK not actually working on restart.  And, of course, the  Microsoft hotfix system was down …

*sigh*

Eventually I found a place where it was mirrored, and I downloaded it, and installed it, and restarted  my machine …

And CHKDSK vomited all over my screen.

This wasn’t an “Oh, here’s a file that’s slightly bollixed.” This was a wildly scrolling screen of index truncations and file system cleanups and evil spirit exorcisms and the like.

Discouraging.

Eventually it finished.  And I wrote down a couple of the files being repaired, just to check on how they were afterward. And the machine restarted and all was well.

Except, when I went to look for those files that I’d written down? They were gone.

Like, gone-gone. Like, CHKDSKed out of existence.

Discouraging.

*     *     *

So here’s where advanced planning comes to the rescue. For once.

I use Backblaze, an online backup system.  I’ve used it before to restore a few individual files.  But now …

I had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of random files deleted.  Two of them I knew of were images that were pulled to my hard drive for my blog.  But there could  be program files (which could be reinstalled).  And there could be more valuable document files, which I couldn’t identify until I went to look for them.

Through Backblaze I could go and do a file-by-file restore, which would just require going through, oh, a hundred thousand files or so across multiple directories, doing a bunch of individual downloads from Backblaze.

Or I could take the “easy” route with Backblaze, which for $190 will send me a USB hard drive of everything backed up off my hard drive. And then I just copy all the Document directories over and, hey-presto, all is right with the world again.

Whew.

Later review (based on what Backblaze was backing up) was I lost about 10,000 files to whatever bollixed up my file system. So it’s an good decision to have taken the course I did.  I’ll report on how the whole rest of the process works once everything has arrived and been fixed.

Of course, none of this addresses what the underlying problem might have been that caused the issue.  Is this a sign of an impending hard drive failure?  Was it a hiccup? What comes next, if anything.

Having an external hard drive with all my document files through the last update will help me face future symptoms (and possible need for a new main hard drive and reinstallation of everything) with a lot more aplomb.

Thanks, Masked Man!