File Became 0 KB, Any Fixes?

[Gwynplaine]

So today I found out one of my files I need somehow got corrupted or something because now it displays as having a size of 0KB. The file icon is still there... but it's like it has no ability to be recognized or opened. I'm running Windows 7 64 Ultimate.

I'm not sure exactly what caused the file to change. Some recent events I suspect could have contributed were a few bluescreen crashes, and also a virus scan where I deleted a bunch of quarantined files without paying attention to which files they were. What I do know is that the file worked fine yesterday, and today after those events it does not.

Does anyone have any suggestions or advice for recovering or repairing my file? I have tried doing a system restore back to last week but this didn't affect it. I also tried an undelete program but of the files it shows I'm not sure any of them are relevant.

Could Checkdisk or any other program repair a corruption or something? I figure that's the next thing I will try but it takes a while. Thanks.

[Gwynplaine]

On a probably related note: my PC has become incredibly unstable in the past two days. Since I have done an intensive virus scan and removed several infections I have been bluescreening constantly. And similarly Firefox itself crashes all the time now. If these are related I would like advice or recommendations for either issue thanks.

[Pandum]

backup and reinstall

[Tymon]

reformat your machine, you're clearly infected with something that is ruining your install

[Cheerios]

backup and reinstall

While being careful to not back up infected files, of course!

[Mayareira]

Recovering 0KB files are difficult. What type of file is that? For example, if it is an outlook file it's got a built-in fix software in it.

0KB's could be caused by anything, power failures, system crashes or...just, well out of blue (Software error).

Best way to avoid this is done by taking regular back ups.

[Kaisha]

I had a couple of those recently on the Windows partition on this Mac, which I chalk up to me having formatted it in FAT32 rather than NTFS like I should have. Chkdsk fixed it for me after having tried 50 other methods. Both OSX and Windows didn't want to touch the file for some reason.

[Gwynplaine]

It was like a 40gb partition itself. So yeah sadface.

If I run a custom install of Win7 it should keep my files in the windows .old folder right?

[Gwynplaine]

Double post lag.

[Izzy]

There was a 0KB file problem in the past with Novell filing systems. You could hex-edit the file and take the string that Novell appended to the beginning out, and it would fix it.

You could have a similar problem, where the file header has some invalid shit in it.

[Gwynplaine]

Someone from another forum supplied this response:

That happened to me once. It can be quite a project to recover from this, and there can be no guarantee of success. I don't think any of the standard file unerase/data-recovery programs are going to help because you already have a zero-byte file of the same name, so there's nothing to search for. Are you technically inclined? I had to go in with a hex editor, hunt for a large block of random data (the lost file), manually locate the file's endpoints, select the block and save it as a new file. The greatest difficulty was in finding and confirming the endpoints. In my case I was able to visually identify what appeared to be the endpoints because there was a perceptible transition between the lost file's fully random data and the non-random data that happened to surround it, but that was sheer luck, and it's not always going to happen. And even then, I had to test the (assumed) headers to ensure that I was in the right place. The headers look just like the rest of the random data, so I grabbed likely samples, saved them as files and tested them one by one until I found the exact spot. Are you up for all that?

Is there any reasonably easy way of doing this? Or do you need to understand hex editing, coding, and all that? It sounds like I'm borked.

[hey]

Someone from another forum supplied this response:


Is there any reasonably easy way of doing this? Or do you need to understand hex editing, coding, and all that? It sounds like I'm borked.

Hex editing has nothing to do with coding. Hex editors are similiar to text editors like notepad, but instead of displaying strings, they display the raw data in hex. Trying to find a file within a file is not exactly difficult, but it can take a lot of luck and/or time. Unless you know exactly what the file looks like, it'll likely take a lot of trial and error. It's kind of like looking for a needle in a needle stack.

[Gwynplaine]

It's not exactly relevant to anyone here, but I just thought I'd follow up and say that I've become reasonably certain the cause of all my BSOD issues has been a bad stick of memory. Not the OS or any virus.