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CHK files are created by ScanDisk during the Save option after it finds a file problem. By the sounds of it, you could have an entire Windows directory in there. This leads me to wonder if you upgraded to Win 98, and this was a renamed Win95 folder, or you reinstalled Win 98 after renaming the existing 98 folder?

What to Do with .CHK Files

I am currently running DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1. I recently ran SCANDISK to check my hard disk. The program created six files with the .CHK extension. I then used the TYPE command to try to review the files but saw only gibberish. File Manager won't open these files, because it says there's no application associated with the file. And Microsoft Word won't open them, either. Is there any way I can determine what is in these files? They are quite large, and if they are useless, I'd like to delete them.

    John R. Schmitz
    VIA THE INTERNET

PC MAGAZINE: Whether they're created by DOS's SCANDISK, Windows 95's SCANDISK, or the DOS CHKDSK program, .CHK files represent space on your disk that was marked as "in use" but didn't actually belong to any particular file. They're usually caused by incomplete file-writing operations, which in turn can be caused by a program or system crash.

The data in a .CHK file can represent any type of file, or it can be incomplete chunks of a file. Viewing .CHK files with TYPE isn't terribly useful, since the listing will fly past too fast and will stop if a byte with the value 26 (Ctrl-Z, or end-of-file) is reached. Instead, try loading the files into Windows Write. Write is surprisingly good at loading binary files, and you can scroll through the file to see if any text is present that might help identify the file. If you can determine the original file type, you can try renaming the .CHK file and opening it with the appropriate application. Even if the file is incomplete, you still may be able to copy text out of it.

Most of the time, however, .CHK files are useless, not worth the time you'd spend to evaluate them. Unless you've had a recent program or system crash and lost certain files, you can reasonably delete .CHK files. If you're unsure, examine each file as described above. If you can rename it to a particular file type and get the corresponding application to load it, excellent! If you can't, try to extract any text you can find within the file, and then delete the file. If no text is visible and you can't find a program that will open it, just delete the file. One way or another, after your examination there should be no .CHK files left on the disk.

In the future, you'll want to deal with .CHK files immediately, because you're more likely to be able to determine their origins by comparison with the work you've been doing recently.

--Neil J. Rubenking

Removing .CHK & .TMP Files:
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     When a program is loaded, it may create temporary files (.TMP). Utilities such as
     ScanDisk and Chkdisk create check files (.CHK). All these files can and should be
     deleted. To find these files, click "Start" select "Find", and click "Files Or Folders".

     In the "Look In box", select the C: drive. In the "Named box" type *.tmp and click
     " Find Now". The *.tmp means you are searching for files that begin with anything, but
     end with the extension TMP. You should be able to select and delete these files.
     Repeat these steps, but type in *.chk and search for check files. You can delete these
     files as well.

     If you are interested in finding all these files in one operation and saving that operation
     to your Desktop, you can create a multiple search. The only difference between a
     single search and a multiple search is the search string you type. You can type in
     several file types as long as you separate them with a comma. To create a multiple
     search and save it to your Desktop, repeat the steps above. This time, in the "Named
     box", type *.tmp,*.chk then select "Save Search" from the File menu. This will
     automatically save the search to your Desktop so you can run it often.

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