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From: bianco@cs.odu.edu (David J. Bianco)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject: Re: Random (?) files generated by DOS
Message-ID: <BIANCO.90Jun30190031@oleander.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 30 Jun 90 23:00:31 GMT
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In-reply-to: skeeve@pawl8.pawl.rpi.edu's message of 30 Jun 90 17:09:31 GMT

In article <'{L$2J|@rpi.edu> skeeve@pawl8.pawl.rpi.edu (Sean C. Cox) writes:

	 In the directory C:\DOS there seem to be quite a few files which 
    are simply 8-digit hexadecimal numbers, which I know weren't from the 
    original DOS disks, and I certainly haven't put them there.
	 Can these files be deleted without hurting anything? They're taking
    up about 1.2 Meg on my hard drive, and I REALLY would like that space 
    back. I'm using DOS 4.01 on a '286 AT-clone.

I think what you are talking about are files generated by CHKDSK. When
you tell it to put all the lost clusters into files, it makes up some
random number to use as a file name and then links all those clusters
together as a file. I believe that if you delete them and then run 
something similar to PC Tool's "Compress" program, you will free up
that space...