CHKDSK on a Portable Hard Drive

Somehow, a file on my portable hard drive has become corrupt. The file is the .ini file for adblockplus, an add-on for Firefox.

• Adblockplus and Firefox don't complain about the corruption.
• Toucan and 7-Zip give corruption warnings.
• Text editors give corruption warnings.
• Delete does not work and gives Windows-level corruption/error messages, as does rename.
• Uninstalling the add-on in Firefox won't help either, since the self-delete does not work. Reinstall of the add-on merely uses the same directory and files.

So far, I have partially solved the problem by first uninstalling the add-on, renaming the directory, and then reinstalling the add-on. This has forced Adblockplus/Firefox to make and use a new directory. However, I still have the old directory there.

I have also tried to do a CHKDSK on the portable hard drive, expecting the offending clusters to be marked BAD. The Windows system says it will perform the CHKDSK on restart, but since the USB hard drive isn't mounted until well after restart, the CHKDSK never happens.

Also, I can't defrag/optimize the hard drive, because the CHKDSK is pending.

My next step is the question... the only thing I can think to do is to copy/backup the entire portable hard drive, format it, and then put everything back onto the drive.

Does anybody have any other suggestions?

Jim