God & Windows Check Disk

There are a lot of words that can describe me. However, I sincerely doubt that "Pious" is one of them.

Now, let me brief you on the technical part of this post. Windows has an inbuilt tool to keep the hard disks and and partitions in check. This tool is quite literally called the Windows Check Disk Utility. You can manually start this with the command chkdsk from run or Start Menu or CMD or PowerShell. But most times, when Windows thinks that the disks might be faulty, it runs the program automatically during boot. What Checkdisk does is, it scans the whole disk for corrupted sectors and files and repairs the sectors and grabs the files and stores them in a folder on drive named FOUND.000. The files are serially named as file000000.chk and so on. The extension, please note, is .chk. This folder is hidden and usually inaccessible in Windows, even if you unhide the folders.

My Laptop, an Acer Predator Helios 300, is home to 3 Operating Systems. Windows - for the Gaming, Graphics and Office Suite. Ubuntu - for AI ,Machine Learning and generally any development. Arch Linux - because I like to experiment and it's a rolling release distribution, meaning I always have the latest softwares.

Back to the Story, the hidden FOUND.000 folder is visible and its contents are accessible in both Linux distros.

The week before. Precisely, Saturday, the 22nd of September 2018, I was at my parents'. It was one of the Saturdays on the Tamil month of Purattasi and Prathosham on the same day. So I had to wear a Naamam and a Pattai on the same day. You can find the picture of me on Instagram that day. For the lack of better words, it was a Memorable day. And that would be an understatement because I am writing a blog about it.

As to why it was memorable, I shall answer shortly. Before, I need to explain my standing with the gods. I am not devoted. Gods come to my mind only when I am nearing deadlines or terribly stuck somewhere. Until then both parties are usually minding our own businesses. I do not necessarily give gods names and bodies, but I do respect what I was taught. Like, I still ask for forgiveness when I step on paper. The Universe in my viewpoint, is way too big of a coincidence to be true. Even a slight change in the powers of the gravitational force would mean none of it would exist. Everything is just right. That's too big of a coincidence to occur naturally and for that I believe there is a higher power.

And for the answer, that day, I was all fired up and asking a lot of favours from God, particularly Shiva, because I happened to be at his temple. Equally, I was criticizing a lot too, like how would the all powerful take interest in me not eating meat for a whole month and so on. To be clear I don't care about those stuff, I want meat, I get meat!

My laptop was sleeping booted into Linux when I returned home. The family insisted on a movie and to make use of the HDR capabilities of my Smart TV, I had to boot into Windows. On reboot, chkdisk ran. Not unusual. We watched the movie and went to sleep. Next day booted into Linux for some work. Now, I have 412GB of data on my Hard Disk without my Windows and Linux System Partitions. Of all the 412GBs of Data, the chkdisk, which rarely ran at all, had picked up exactly two corrupted files.

Normally, on Windows, I wouldn't have been able to open these. But I was in Linux. In Linux, file extensions don't matter (Remeber the .chk extensions?). Ubuntu identified them as JPEGs. Images. And, coincidentally, my Linux Photo Viewer was somehow able to open two very corrupted files grabbed by the chkdsk utility. Let's get to the spooky part.

One was Picture of a Temple, the other was Shiva half drowned in a flood.

I do not even remember having them in my computer. Of the 412GB of data, only these two! I don't know if it was pure coincidence or a divine intervention, but I did not sleep until I found where the pictures came from. I had some backed up data from my old phone, YU Yureka. The pictures were from the WhatsApp Images folder and I'm guessing it was probably the "Extended" Family WhatsApp group.

Still, Spooky and definitely worth a blog entry!