Hi,
I had to run scandisk (/all /surface & /autofix) after a failed boot and operating system (w98) CRASH and lost some data. I now have 9999 .chk files some of them with 10,000+kb and I think they might have the lost data. I have restored windows and FOUND some of my files, but all the lost ONES were in the windows directory. The most important file is the outlookexpress .dbx file and address book.
How can I get into these and see what they contain. I have tried wordpad but I just get a load of weired characters and garble.
Any idea or help appreciated.
Thanks.When scandisk finds lost junk it saves it into those files. However, it's basically guess work what they are. If wordpad or something similar doesn't give you any insight, try paint... excel... media player... anything to try and FIND out what it is. If it's something to do with Outlook you want, try opening them with outlook. You can use their sizes to have a guess what's what...

If you've got literally 9999 .chk files, what the heck hapened to your computer?   Take it swimming or something?

Unless something physical happened to your harddrive (like powersurge or swimming) or you've got the time, surface scans aren't usually nessisary.