A brass teacher in Atherstone works across half a dozen schools in the north of the county and carries what he needs on one USB stick: his own arrangements for beginner bands, parts scanned and marked up over twenty years of rehearsals, and recordings of concerts going back to the days of the colliery bands. Filenames started appearing as rows of odd characters. He did what the machine suggested and let Windows scan and repair the drive, after which two folders had gone altogether and a new one named FOUND.000 had arrived holding FILE001.CHK, FILE002.CHK and several hundred more. He rang to ask whether he had ruined it.
| Media | A USB stick whose filenames turned into rows of unreadable characters and which, after a Windows scan and repair, has lost two folders and gained a FOUND.000 folder holding several hundred numbered CHK files. It carries a music teacher's arrangements, scanned parts and concert recordings. |
| What was reported | USB stick, filenames displaying as odd characters, the Windows scan and repair accepted once, two folders now absent, a FOUND.000 folder holding FILE001.CHK onwards, the owner afraid he has made it worse, arrangements, parts and recordings all wanted. |
| Fault class | Filesystem damage first, and a repair tool acting on it second. The odd characters were the directory being misread rather than the music being harmed. The repair then detached every fragment it could not attach to a name and wrote each one out with a number instead, which is where the missing folders went. The content was still on the stick, in two forms rather than one. |
| On the bench | Read behind a hardware write blocker so that nothing further could act on it, and imaged on DeepSpar behind PC-3000 UDMA before a single folder was examined. Everything after that happened on the copy: the directory rebuilt in R-Studio from the records that survived, the numbered fragments matched back to the files they had been cut from by content signature and by the names held inside the files themselves, and the remainder carved by content and described rather than named. Every arrangement and every recording opened before it was written to fresh media. |
Garbled names are a misread index, not damaged music. A filesystem keeps names in one place and contents in another. When the part holding the names is damaged the machine still draws whatever bytes it finds there as characters, and the row of symbols he was looking at is the result. Nothing had happened to the recordings at that stage, which is why his position was considerably better before the repair than it looked.
The repair tool was doing its job, and its job is not the same as yours. What it repairs is the volume's internal consistency: it wants a structure the operating system can trust from end to end. Anything it finds that no directory entry claims stands in the way of that, so it is detached and dropped into FOUND.000 with a number for a name. The two folders that vanished were the entries it could not make sense of. He was right that running it made things worse, and wrong to think it had destroyed anything, because nearly all of it was still present in numbered form.
Fragments can usually be given their names back, and not always. Every file type carries a signature at its front, so a fragment can be identified by what it is. Many formats also hold their own title inside them, and a recording tagged with a concert and a date effectively puts itself back where it belongs. Where nothing internal survives, a file comes back correct in content with a description instead of a name, and no laboratory can invent the original. That is worth saying before the work starts, because a folder of correct music under wrong names is a real outcome and it disappoints people who were not warned.
Stopping after one run is the difference between this job and a far worse one. Each further pass rewrites more of the structure and pushes more material into fragments, and the fragments start being written over as the volume is tidied. One run leaves something rebuildable. Several runs, or a run followed by copying fresh files onto the drive to see whether it works now, leaves a heap. He stopped because he was worried, which was the right instinct even though he had no way of knowing it.
The stick read normally behind a write blocker, which settled the hardware question at once: the controller answered, the memory was reachable and the whole of the damage sat in the structure. It imaged in a single pass with no weak regions. The FOUND.000 folder was present in that image with its contents readable, which is the best starting point this particular fault offers.
The rebuild ran in R-Studio against the image and never against the stick. Enough directory records survived to put most of the tree back with its folders and its dates, and the fragments were then matched against it by content and by length, with the tags inside the recordings settling several dozen on their own. Anything still unclaimed was carved by signature. The same file often appeared both in place and as a fragment, so the set was reduced by content rather than by name before anyone looked at it.
The arrangements came back complete, the scanned parts with them, and all but a handful of the recordings. Around ninety files came back with the right music and no original name; they went out in a folder of their own, ordered by the date they were written so he could work through them in sequence. Two recordings had been cut across by the repair and are incomplete, and both were of concerts that other people had also recorded.
A stick is £250 + VAT. The casing was never opened and the memory stayed where it was, so no fix, no fee applied, and the invoice waited until he had opened a score and played a recording at his own end.
Do not run it again, and do not delete FOUND.000, because that folder is your files in a different shape. If the drive still opens, copy all of it onto another disk, FOUND.000 included, before you do anything else, and then stop rather than renaming fragments to guess what they are. Renaming on the original is a write, and writes are the thing you are trying to avoid. Do not let the machine tidy, defragment or optimise the drive, and do not save anything new onto it, since new files land in the space the fragments are lying in. The odd characters that started it are worth describing exactly as you saw them, because a whole volume showing as symbols and one folder showing as symbols are different faults with different prospects. Say how many times the repair ran, whether anything has been written since, and roughly how full the drive was, since a nearly full one leaves the tool very little room to have moved things into.
What this job cost, and on what terms. This one was charged at £250 + VAT, the figure agreed in writing before any work began. Paying for a job like this one. Nothing here called for the disk to be opened, a board rebuilt or a chip lifted off, which puts the work on the logical side of the line and under no fix, no fee. Files back, invoice follows; nothing back, nothing owed, and the media goes home either way. Four sorts of work sit outside that promise and only those four: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. The rest keep it, firmware and service-area repair included — both are logical jobs whatever their reputation suggests.
If yours is doing the same thing. This card was read at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, about fifty-five miles down the M40. Post it tracked and insured, send it by a courier you book yourself, or bring it to the Oxford reception during Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm — there is no collection service and no counter in Coventry. The free look at it takes two working days from booking in and produces one written figure that then holds.
Freephone 0800 689 0668 to talk it through first. The shipping form and what goes in the parcel are on the contact page, and every band is published in full — including which work sits outside no fix, no fee.
These are real enquiries, from households and from businesses in Coventry and out across Warwickshire — Nuneaton and Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam. Names are gone: the customer, the company, the job title, anything at all that would point back at a person. What stays is the reasoning — what turned up, where the fault genuinely sat, which approach it demanded, and which machine on the bench did the work. One of the thirty-six was refused, and it earns a place here as squarely as any of the rest.
A connector that never fitted properly has been working its solder joints loose the whole time
An intermittent contact writes half a change and leaves the index describing something that is no longer there
A camera asking to format a card is a camera admitting it cannot read the index, nothing more
A FOUND.000 folder you did not create? Ring 0800 689 0668 and leave it exactly where it is. Sticks are £250 + VAT, and what can be rebuilt is established before anything is agreed.