Relevant Basic Details Needed When Posting A Question Here ...

[joko]

Recently I asked a question about my computer.
I noted the make and model number, my operating system, and the software i had used most recently to help with the problem i was asking about - in the original post.

- however 2 people came on a said I had STILL not provided enough information about my computer for them to answer the question ...
I dont know what other info to supply, and they didnt tell me ...

can anyone tell me what other general basic information I should be adding to my future computer questions - other than the above...?

obviously i know if the question is about something particular, like a dvd drive etc, to add more about that - but in general what else is there?

(I would also suggest to the Ed to perhaps add this info to the top of the technology page so people know in advance what to add ...)

Thanks

[boxtops]

Joko, I don't know what else you can add - I guess it's the nature of the question you ask as to what the techies might want to know. And of course they're not on here all the time, so might not see your question even if you give the full info....

[rojash]

^^ Pretty much what Methyl said.

What you told us was a bit like someone telling a doctor "I'm a 30 year old male, and I'm ill", and failing to mention the symptoms, and the lead up to becoming ill.

You didn't tell us what you meant by "a big crash" - you meant an external hard drive failure. - and in fact by saying "it's clogging up my machine", you implied this was a problem with an internal drive.

You didn't tell us that you'd used Recuva to actually recover files, in fact your post implied that you'd recovered most of it using some other method/software, and subsequently tried to used Recuva to remove corrupt.

A much better post would have explained (insofar as you knew) exactly what went wrong with what, when, and under what circumstances.

[joko]

thanks all ... i thought maybe there was something more detailed that i needed to add.

i understand what you're saying regarding my post, but just to reiterate i wasnt asking for help to recover files etc - i just wanted to know if there was any software that would seek out and files or folders that were incomplete, broken or corrupt and either delete them or collect them in one place, regardless of how they got that way - which is why i didnt think i needed to explain it all.

i figured someone would know of something similar to Recuva or something you see.


but just to explain though - i recovered deleted files from 3 different external hard drives, in the hope of getting back a copy of everything i had - only one hard drive crashed, but the other drives contained files i had deleted - and this is why there are a lot of duplicates as well as a lot of corrupt files all mixed together.
the problem is half the files were overwritten and many have been somehow renamed - either with a file name of something else of mine, or just jibberish .. so i have to open every single thing to see what it is before i can delete or resave it with a proper name.

[rojash]

Well, just to reiterate what I said in my reply to your original post. Because Recuva has processed the fragments it found, they are no longer "corrupt", in the sense that they may be useless to the application that crated them, but they are now fully valid in the sense that they have a start, and end, and an entry in the file system. It's therefore pretty well impossible for an all-purpose program to scan them and detect that they are useless. The only way to find out is to attempt to open them according to their extensions (jpg, doc, etc).

[Answerprancer]

My answer to a computer problem like this is "nuke and pave".
ie. Pull out all the files you want to keep, save them to an external HD (or CDs/DVDs if there are not that many) then re-format and re install the OS - start from new.

[joko]

thanks rojash
and AP - i would - but there are many many thousands of them and i dont know what half of them are - so i am afraid of deleting something i want to keep by accident.
also i seem to have loads of icon jpegs from software packages too - like buttons, icon, brushes etc ... its ridiculous how much stuff is there

[joko]

yes i often do reset the computer back to factory settings...

but surely doing that and cherry pickin what i want to keep is the same amount of work as deleting the ones i dont ... i still have to click on them all to see whether they will open up or not, if not, i delete it, and if they do, i see what they actually are and rename...

or am i missing something?

[joko]

no faults methyl - i just like to do it now and again ... i like having the machine almost like new again... why is that a norman wisdom moment?

whatever you may think i am not a computer novice ... i used to build computers ...


and regarding my question - you are missing the point - i dont want to have to go through every single file and folder on my computer to see if i want to keep it or not - it is the same amount of work as deleting them - and that is what i am trying to avoid, and why i was asking about some software to speed it up.

i saved them all to one place with the intention of going through them but there were far more than i realised ... i have already done a large proportion of it and it has taken me ages.

[rojash]

You might get a pretty good clue, simply by sorting the files into size order. Any file (othere than a txt file) whose size is equal to the block size is likely to be suspect.

[joko]

thanks rojash, i did try that, because many files were showing a 0 or 1 bytes etc and wouldnt open at all, so i deleted them.
it helped get rid of some in bulk, but some of the ones that won't open are registering as large files.