System Recovery Like It's 1999

Last night, I popped in the SD card from our camera into my laptop, and was greeted with a heart stopping "I/O error." The disk, as far as windows was concerned, was broken.

I finally found a work around - I put the SD card (it's actually a miniSD card) into my Sidekick, then connected my Sidekick to the computer as USB device. Thankfully, the Sidekick allowed us to get all the photos off the drive.

Shira dabbled around with the card and learned that we apparently had a corrupt folder on it that was keeping Windows from reading it.

I decided to give fixing the drive a shot, so I tried the only command I know on windows to fix drives - cksdsk.exe. I suppose I first used this command back in the early to mid 90's, when DOS was the order of the day.

After a bit of poking around, not only was chkdsk still available, but it was actually the recommended standard. You can run it in a GUI mode (My Computer >> Right Click on Drive >> Properties >> Tools >> Check Now), but it's more authentic and fun to go old school and run it from the DOS prompt (Start >> Run >> cmd.exe):

  chkdsk /r e:

When I ran the command, I was greeted by error messages like:

The \DCIM\205CANON\IMG_5717.JPG entry contains a nonvalid link.
The \DCIM\205CANON\IMG_5718.JPG entry contains a nonvalid link.
The \DCIM\205CANON\IMG_5720.JPG entry contains a nonvalid link.
\DCIM\205CANON\IMG_5722.JPG is cross-linked on allocation unit 11061.
Cross link resolved by copying.
\DCIM\205CANON\IMG_5724.JPG is cross-linked on allocation unit 11127.
Cross link resolved by copying.
\DCIM\205CANON\IMG_5729.JPG is cross-linked on allocation unit 11121.
Cross link resolved by copying.
\DCIM\205CANON\IMG_5732.JPG is cross-linked on allocation unit 11303.

I don't know what it all means, but it sounds important and makes me feel like chkdsk is doing something.

My current attempt to run chkdsk is actually hanging at the end of the process. Googling around for a solution hasn't turned up anything, but my guess is that I need to run chkdsk from Safe Mode, or some such nonesense.

I was going to include a rant in here about how embarrassed Microsoft should be that after so many years, the same basic command line tool is still in use. But then I realized, I'm still using /sbin/fsck on Linux, and that seems totally reasonable to me.

On the other hand, Windows has basically moved away from command line utilities, whereas Linux hasn't - so maybe the comparison isn't the same.

This just all brought back flashbacks of using a DOS Luggable, with a 4 inch screen and dual floppy drives. Good times, good times.

Update: Turns out, chkdsk was hanging because I was attempting to run it in a cygwin rxvt terminal. I ran the same command as above in a regular old DOS box, and it worked like a charm. I now have a clean drive.