Ask Slashdot: What's a Good Tool To Detect Corrupted Files?

Volanin writes "Currently I use a triple boot system on my Macbook, including MacOS Lion, Windows 7, and Ubuntu Precise (on which I spend the great majority of my time). To share files between these systems, I have created a huge HFS+ home partition (the MacOS native format, which can also be read in Linux, and in Windows with Paragon HFS). But last week, while working on Ubuntu, my battery ran out and the computer suddenly powered off. When I powered it on again, the filesystem integrity was OK (after a scandisk by MacOS), but a lot of my files' contents were silently corrupted (and my last backup was from August...). Mostly, these files are JPGs, MP3s, and MPG/MOV videos, with a few PDFs scattered around. I want to get rid of the corrupted files, since they waste space uselessly, but the only way I have to check for corruption is opening them up one by one. Is there a good set of tools to verify the integrity by filetype, so I can detect (and delete) my bad files?"

Comments

For MP3s use amp3test.exe

[denis-The-menace]

2000-2001 MAF-Soft http://www.maf-soft.de/
The version I have is v1.0.3.102

It can scan single mp3s and entire folders structures for defects and logs everything if you wish. It will give you a percentage of how good the file is.

Depending on the damage you may be able to fix headers and chop off corrupted tag info with something like a MP3Pro Trim v1.80.exe

Re:Newbie question hour?

[Volanin]

Author here:

> Last backup August.
Yes, that was silly of me.

> Thinks there is a way to detect generic file corruption
There is no way to detect generic file corruption. But there is a way to detect specific filetype corruption. For example, I already found mp3val, that is able to scan all my mp3 and check for file integrity, and even fix a few kinds of corruption (such as unmatching bytes in the header and sound chunks). Maybe with the right set of tools, I might also detect (or even fix) my corrupted pictures, movies and books as well.

Re:compare them to an intact backup

[ncw]

That is a good thought, and photorec does an excellent job of finding pictures and videos by searching through your sectors - definitely worth a try.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

Re:Your eyes

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Might be better using the "identify" command of ImageMagick. The man page says:

The identify program is a member of the ImageMagick(1) suite of tools. It describes the format and characteristics of one or more image files. It also reports if an image is incomplete or corrupt.