Title says it all. I only run Linux on my box and would hate to have to go back to a windows machine to deal with this.

To pre-empt the question why it is I have these files if I only run Linux. They are on an external drive that I used on my PC when it was a win box. Would like to see what they are and if any of them are recoverable. Thanks.

you need a hex editor to read it, like shed

Use the "file" command and see if it recognizes the file type. This isn't very different from files in the "lost & found" directory after running fsck.

Bear in mind that some of the files may be just fragments and not usable. If you have the beginning of the file, find should recognize it. The file command examines the contents of the file.

A browser such as konqueror may use file's "magic" database and show the filetype via the icon or a preview.

A couple of weeks ago in another thread I whipped up a simple script that will rename file extensions based on information detected from the file command. You can add as many kinds of file as you want; just find some unique character string in the "file" output to match and add it to the list.

I also found this page just now and tried the two programs under wine. The first one, UnCHK requires some kind of MS scripting support installation which I didn't bother to fool with, but the second one runs just fine, and easily renamed a sample .zip file I created.

Thank you for your replies.

I used file and file -i to check the files in question. All of them with the exception of one returned "data; application/octet-stream". I checked them in emacs and can't really discern anything.

One file returned mpeg and I renamed it as such and tried to play it but the media player didn't recognize anything to play.

Do you think I am just spinning my wheels here and these files are probably unrecoverable? If there is a reasonable possibility of recovering them I am willing to invest the time and jump through some more hoops to do it.

Thanks again.

According to some windows forums, 95% is unrecoverable.

The contents of the chk files is just raw data. Whether it will make some sense depends only on pure luck. There's no reliable way to recover this files. Nor under linux nor under windows nor under any other OS. At most, you can search for patrons inside the files and try to rescue the contents manually or using some tools that will recognize known sequences of bits and try to extract meaningful parts as regular files.

Of course, an hex editor can be used, but for that you first need to know what are you looking for, and after that, how to separate the meaningful parts of the meaningless ones. In the best case, the beginning of the chk file will math with the beginning of a real file. In this case it's easier to rescue the file in linux, because linux, unlike windows, doesn't rely on the file extension, but on the first few so called magic bytes of the file, so it might recognize the file even if the extension is not the right one. As said, the command "file" can do this. But that doesn't guarantee that the whole chk file contains useful data, and it can't guarantee either that all of the original file is in the chk file (it might not even be complete if you put together all the chk's).