What are Found.00 files and folders?

Question

Sometimes in my hard disk I can see some of the folders names Found.00 and etc in a hidden mode. I guess this is scan log folders and files . But why this has been created ? how do we get rid of those and what kind of information we can get it from those ?

Solution 1

I think these are files retrieved by ScanDisk/chkdsk. They usually contained orphaned fragments of files created when either a program or the computer crashed.

I've found this post from 2001 which asks the same question as you do. The answer as posted was:

These are a kind of log file that is created by scandisk everytime it runs on bootup and finds an error, you can safely delete these, without any problems

A more recent post on Tom's Hardware from 2005 says the same thing. It adds:

They are folders created by chkdsk and can be deleted. You won't be able to get any meaningful data out of them.

If you notice files and/or folders going missing without a program hanging then I'd be more concerned that your disk or computer was about to fail. It might be prudent to do a full backup of your data just in case.

Solution 2

These files are created by chkdsk and contain unsalvageable file-fragments. Usually the files in these folders are the lost temporary files, which were created but could not be correctly released or closed. They can be deleted with no harm, except if they contain documents that you would like to retrieve in any possible form. Such files are more likely to occur on FAT32 disks than on the more advanced NTFS file-system.

However, it is worrisome that they exist all, since normally they were files that were open and created by some program that was brutally interrupted without Windows being able to clean up after it. This can have two explanations:

1. Someone turns off the external disk or even the computer brutally by cutting off the current, or
2. Your Windows hangs often, maybe because of hardware problems, even in the drive itself.

In short, these files should not exist under normal conditions, and if they continue to occur you should rather treat first the root cause for this happening.