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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?"
Alright now I'm afraid I can't help with your verify problem but I do have one piece of solid advice: get rid of Paragon HFS immediately!
It is a truly shoddy piece of software that as of version 9.0 has a terrible bug that will cause it to destroy HFS+ filesystems. Google "paragon hfs corruption" and you will see many many horror stories from people who just plugged a Mac OS X disk into a Windows machine w/ Paragon HFS and then discovered the entire filesystem was hosed. In my dual-boot win/mac setup I replaced my copy of MacDrive with a trial version of Paragon HFS 9.0 from their website and every single one of the six HFS+ disks I had connected internally were damaged. Disk Utility couldn't do a thing and I had to buy a program called Diskwarrior to even begin to recover data. I ended up losing two disks worth of files anyway.
http://www.mac-help.com/t12137-opened-hfs-drive-win7-paragon-hfs-now-wont-boot.html
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=299306
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1677099
http://www.avforums.com/forums/apple-mac/1509344-hfs-super-block-not-found.html
whew! Anyway the pain I went through after that software very nearly ruined my life was so great, I don't want it to happen to anyone else. According to their own website 9.0 has this awful bug but they fixed it in 9.0.1. Evidently the trial download on the main page is still for version 9.0 and still has the disk destroying bug! Any software company that releases a filesystem driver with this terrible a bug (not to mention the numerous reports of BSODs and other relatively minor problems) clearly has terrible quality assurance and simply can't be trusted.