How to monitor and fix corrupted files on the computer?

[superboyac]

In line with my recent backing up issues...

Often with external USB drives (hard drive and flash drives), I have this problem with corrupted files.  The files themselves are difficult to delete and they get annoying sometimes.  Is there any software that can monitor a computer for corrupted files and even fix them...at the very least, delete them with ease?

I don't even really know what a corrupt file is.  When I do a scandisk or other disk checking software, it doesn't appear, so it's not really a bad sector like I was thinking.  So I don't know what corrupt actually means.

[f0dder]

Hm, sounds a bit weird. On NT systems, use "chkdsk /f X:" to repair minor filesystem problems. If the problems are bad enough that you have unreadable folders, lost important files, etc. do NOT run chkdsk, but a nondestructive recovery program (like GetDataBack).

[Carol Haynes]

Actually chkdsk /r c: on windows xp is best as it scans file contents and free space too. Note that running chkdsk on drive C: (with /f or /r) requires a reboot as it needs exclusive access to the disc to do the repairs. Also if you run chkdsk c: with windows running you will more than likely get errors displayed. I get "Run chkdsk again with the /f switch" promts - this is purely because files are open or in use at the time - when I do a reboot with chkdsk /r c: it doesn't show up any errors.

A corrupted file is just that - corrupted ... not what it is meant to be. Basically the data has either not been written to the disc correctly or some of the data has been accidentally been changed or deleted so that the checksums for the file does not match its contents.

This is often associated with files not being completely written to disc. Basically when Windows writes data to disc it generally does it in chunks of data rather than byte by byte - when there isn't a complete chunk to write it tends to wait - leaving the data in a buffer until it is time to write to the disc again. Logging off or restarting the computer should flush the buffers to disc but if something goes wrong it may not happen properly. MS have tried to fix this a number fo times and generally under NTFS things are much better than they were under FAT32 systems but it still can happen occasionally.

On idea for checking file integrity is to use something like WinRAR to produce archive copies with a recovery record. You can then test the archive and if it is damaged the recovery record may be able to salvage the files.