Odd Files on New USB

I recently purchased from a reputable store in my local high street an 8 gig USB drive branded Shintaro made in China. The drive was presented in professional sealed packaging.
Upon opening the drive I found it contained a number of files totaling around 300MB.
A screen shot of some of the files is below

My AV says there is nothing actionable on the drive.

Some of the files have a Last Modified date many years into the future. ie 19/4/2054. Some of the files have a last modigied date of well in the past ie 16/8/1988.


When viewing the files in windows explorer with large icons several use the icon for system files.

As a matter of curiosity I'd like to know what these files are and/or why they are on my supposedly new USB.
If i go ahead and delte these files what effect might this have on the USB performance.

 

Hi,
I do not know what these files are but it would be safe to delete these as it would not effect the functuality of the drive, the files are probably of were they have run some type of function tests and they have forgotten to delete them.

iain.t :major

 

I'd return it - cheap, no-name brands may not be what they profess on the label.

 

I just attempted to delete. I recieved a message that the drive was faulty and i chose to repair bad sectors.

I now have a list of .chk files ( recovered file fragmants). all 4kb

Yep I could and probably should just delete the .chk files
If its a nusiance for you to continue to assist please advise that this is the case.

Curiosity killed the cat.

I'm curiouse to see if there is any readable data in any of these files.

What program will open a .chk file. Will any data be in a format that a non programmer can understand.

 

They're only 4k in size, try dropping them into Notepad.

 

Thanks satrow. that notepad did not turn anything usefull up. It changed the name of the notepad doc to 123.chk but nothing readable showed. A blank page.

I examined some of the chk files with a program called chk-mate which supposedly allocates the correct file exension.
The program was unable to determine anything in this case.

I noted that now I had 8000 of these 4kb files. could be copies made by CHK-mate after i tried several times to examine them.

I note that windows explorer now shows the USB as both drive E and drive F
drive E is not accessible and has no free space.

I have deleted the chk files. drive F shows a total of 6.57 GB of free space and 651 mb of used space on an 8gb drive. no file names show in windows explorer.

I'm returning the drive for a refund.
I'll watch this thread for a day or so incase anyone has any comments to add.

Thanks for help and advice.

 

Hi Dadpad,

I'm a little late but maybe this will answer some of your questions:

XXX.CHK files are corrupted files recovered by CHKDSK. They are only handy if they happen to be text files of which you can recovered the good parts and not have to rewrite your latest novel. They are usually 'Orphan' files. The last thing done in a write to disk is to make or update the directory (Folder) entry. When there are problems writing to the disk the entry is missed. You should be able to open them in NoPad or Wordpad if too large for notepad and see if any of your good stuff is there. Hope this helps a little.

Good luck, Jim

 

jlphlp,
thanks for clarification

 

Hi again Dadpad,

Thanks for the thanks. Also I forgot to mention that another way to corrupt the files is to remove the drive from the USB before the write is finished. That is also the purpose of the warning beep if you forget to stop the device before removing it.

More luck, Jim