What are these hidden FOUND.xxx folders in C:?

I know they have something to do with chkdsk, but I'm not sure what exactly. Can I just delete them?

I believe that chkdsk saves data that is in a corrupted area of the disk to these folders.

Any reason to keep them? Can you recover the data?

LoneWolf121188 said:

Any reason to keep them? Can you recover the data?

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If you're fairly good with a hex editor/viewer*, potentially. I'd say delete them, though, since almost all end users are not.

* You could actually teach yourself something about computer forensics if you are curious, by sorting through 'em with a hex editor.

depending what's in there, yes you can recovier it. But you should know how, say a word file differs from a DLL, or it's not worth it.

Heh yeah, when i was younger (like 8) and those types of files were saved I would always keep them. I figured out pretty quickly that I didn't have the skills to actually make use of them. Put it like this... those files are like raw data that could be arranged in any which way. If you can't make sense of it on a bit/hex level, or can't find a program that will do it for you (do these exist??? a program that scans through raw data and looks for blocks of recognized formats), then they're just taking up sectors

sometimes they are helpful if you can find text from a document you were writing that you didn't get a chance to save, still might have various ascii characters embedded within it though.