Chkdsk/NTFS question

I have WinXP Pro (SP2), and I recently had some problems with one of my NTFS partitions. I checked it for errors (from MyComputer, I right clicked on the volume, and chose properties->tools->error checking->"check now" button, just to be clear). Then, I found a "found.000" directory in the root of that partition, containing a 708 byte "file0000.chk" file. I deleted it without thinking too much of it (like I would after running scandisk on a FAT32 volume). But after that, I noticed that a pretty big chunk of files (think GB) disappeared, even though the system reported the same free space as before. I ran a check again, "file0000.chk" came up again, and my files were visible and accessible again. What that means, as far as I can tell, is that "file0000.chk" contains file system information pertaining to the chunk of files that I mentioned, without which I cannot access those files (they'd be lost clusters in FAT32, and that's probably correct for NTFS too although I don't really know anything about that). Can't this information be stored in the file system itself like it should, instead of that .chk file? I don't know anything about NTFS, but this situation seems pretty ridiculous to me. What would happen if I moved or deleted that chunk of files (is it safe to do that)? I was hoping someone more knowledgeable could shed some light on what's going on, before I find out the hard way.

 

OK, something happened in my browser when I tried to reply so I'll do this again.

I'm not an NTFS expert but "fileXXX.chk" files used to indicate chunks of filespace that somehow got corrupted - either the space was cross-linked to multiple files (such that multiple files thought they owned the same chunk of disk real estate), resided on bad chunks of the platter, etc. I thought the older FAT file systems offered some way to try and repair these errors but that wasn't always successful. If the files in question were merely files one had created this wasn't a problem (assuming one kept backups). It appears that, in your case, these are files that belong to the OS. There may be utilities to try and fix this problem but you may also be forced to go back and try to restore the OS from CD. I wouldn't jump on that yet, wait and see if someone else offers a better solution.