Windows 7: Where did this come from

A few days I had to restore my computer back to factory status as I was having registry trouble.



This turned up on my desk top yesterday




Edb.chk

You are attempting to open a file of type “Recovered file fragments (.chk)

These files are used by the operating system and by various programmes

Editing or modifying them could change your system.

If you still want to open click open or otherwise click cancel.





When I click cancel nothing happens and the file is still there

What should I do – I am worried that if I delete it something may go wrong.

Using Dell Inspiron 545 Windows 7 home premium 64 bit


Liz

I believe that file has to do with Windows Live Mail.

You should be able to delete it. At any rate, it is not a critical system file that will brick your machine if removed.

Some one suggested to delete it in safe mode but I was worried as I was not sure if it was something vital.

Liz

Nope, not vital.

Thanks will remove it now

Liz

CHK files are what the message you quote states - that is a file fragment - due to the way that file systems work files are actually often stored are multiple parts or fragments. (hence the term Defragmenting that is applied to setting these files into contiguous files)

when something goes wrong with the file system these fragments can lose their link to the other fragments that make up the full file, and the system can make the fragment into a separate file - as with the one you can see on your desktop.

They may sometimes be useful if the file once contained irreplaceable information, but recovering this information is a specialist task.

as has been said unless you are missing vital data that may be in this file then it may be safely deleted

hope the explanation helps to clarify things

Many thanks.

I was worried that it might delete something I needed.

I have done a hard disk error check and a Disk Cleanup and should I do a defrag - as you can see i am not exactly computer literate so quite wary.

If OK I shall delete in Safe Mode when I start up tomorrow.

Cheers

Liz

Defragging is for fragmented files and wouldn't make much of a difference. It may be the panacea of the cheap tech support services, but it doesn't fix anything but fragmented files clogging your system folders.

As for deleting, you shouldn't need to do it in Safe Mode unless your system doesn't let you delete it in normal mode. Even then, you should be able to delete it with cmd.exe.

Windows 7 is set-up, as standard, to perform weekly, background, disk defragmentation automatically, but the time is set to something like 2am so you may wish to reset this to a time that the machine is more likely to be running or do this manually.

The options may be found by right clicking on a drive icon in explorer, (C: is most likely to need it), and choosing tools on the properties entry. This gives you a way to run manually or adjust the automatic function

Many thanks everyone for your help - I have taken the plunge and just deleted it.

Cheers

Liz