By Fred Langa Losing Windows’ file names can be almost as bad as losing the files themselves. Getting all your data back the way it was may be possible, but it’ll take some serious digging.

Files recovered but given meaninglessnames

Lynn Tait’s PC suffered a severe drive breakdown:

• “I recently had two hard-drive failures, both slave and master. My files were recovered but all my photos now have new names like file00000123. Photoshop won’t open them — doesn’t recognize the format.
  
  “The metadata in Bridge shows the real file name under original and/or preserved file name. How do I get my old file names back or at least have them recognized by Photoshop and Lightroom?”
  

Ouch! That must have been some crash!



You may be able to recover the names, but I’m sorry to say it probably won’t be easy. If the names had been easily recoverable, the file-recovery process most likely would have found and used them.

I also wonder about the integrity of the “recovered” files. If the files were indeed fully recovered, a tool such as Photoshop should be able to open them, even with a changed name. I suspect more got mangled in the crash than may be immediately apparent.

Hopefully, with a little more detective work you’ll find the path to a solution:

First, try explicitly renaming one of your mangled files. For example, rename file00000123 to test1.jpg. Then try opening the file with your normal photo-editing tools.

No luck? Try a general-purpose image viewing/conversion tool. Because these tools are meant to handle almost any kind of image file, they may be a lot less fussy about the original file formats than high-end, precision photo-manipulation tools.

For example, a tool such as the free-to-try, U.S. $49-to-buy Image Converter Plus (download page) claims to support over 800 image file types and variants. If your saved files are in a format approximating any one of those 800 types, this tool should be able to open them.

Other sites offer free tools — for example, Online Image Converter, ImageMagick, and the venerable IrfanView, all recognize a wide range of image types.

If you can find any software that can open your test file, you’ll probably be able to open all the damaged files and save them with new names in whatever format you want. The newly saved files should now open in other, more-exacting software.

As for recovering the lost names, a tool like Quick File Rename (info site) might do the trick. The app is free to try or €37.84 (U.S. $48) to buy. Otherwise, a skillful programmer could probably write you a script to mine whatever metadata is available and use it to rename the associated files. But I wouldn’t want to try writing that script myself: It’s beyond anything I could cobble together on my own in a reasonable amount of time.

As a last resort, you could use a low-level, hard-drive-analysis tool called a hex(adecimal) editor or sector editor to examine the files (literally byte by byte) to see what information might be in there. You also can use hex editors to rename or repair unopenable files.

But I have to warn you: using a hex editor is a very slow, difficult, and laborious process. So it may best be left to data-recovery professionals.

If you still want to give it a shot after that warning, the Freeware Hex Editor XVI32 (info page) is excellent and works fine on Windows 7.

But with luck, a non-fussy image-manipulation tool will get your files opened and resaved with usable names and formats.

And if I may climb on a soapbox for a moment: this is one of the reasons it’s important not only to have backups but to store them on CDs or DVDs away from your PC, where they’re immune to PC-based trouble.

Should you defrag a solid-state drive (SSD)?

Questions about drive defragmentation just keep coming. Rob Schneider’s is short and to the point:

• “Does defragging the new solid-state hard drives have any benefit?”
  

Probably not. The main benefit of defragging is the reduction of the time required to mechanically reposition the drive heads as they seek different pieces of a given file.

SSDs have no moving mechanical components, so there’s no real benefit to re-ordering the files.

Moreover, making unnecessary writes to an SSD can actually shorten the life of the most-used memory cells. For more info, see my Jan. 7, 2010, item, “Windows, solid-state disks, and ‘trim’.”

So, if you’re one of the small (but growing) number of people with an SSD, I’d suggest not defragging.

Diagnosing strange .exe start-up files

Bruce Taylor has two mysterious files that always want to run at startup.

• “I wonder if you could please help me get rid of two files — igfxpers.exe and hkcmd.exe. Both files appear separately at the time of start-up, and I have to click on Cancel to get rid of them.”
  

Your question touches on two separate issues, Bruce. One is identifying the mystery files; the other is getting them out of your start-up process.

A few minutes with your favorite search engine, using an exact file name as the search term, will almost always turn up information about what the file is, who made it, and what it does.

For example, searching on igfxpers.exe will show you that the file is the “Intel Common User Interface Module” often installed on systems with Intel-based graphics chips. It’s part of the system tray software that allows you to quickly access and change graphics settings such as resolution and refresh rate.

Likewise, a quick search shows that hkcmd.exe is part of Intel’s configuration and diagnostic software for their multimedia devices.

Normally, these tools launch at start-up without user intervention. In your case, they’re not working properly. Even if they were working, these tools are optional; it’s perfectly OK to use Windows’ built-in means of changing graphics settings. So feel free to uninstall the Intel tools if you wish.

You can uninstall them in the normal manner. Open Control Panel, then Add or Remove Programs; select any graphics-related software that shows Intel as the manufacturer. Click Uninstall. The software will be gone and won’t interfere with your start-up any longer.

Those steps almost always work, especially for software components from major vendors such as Intel. But sometimes you may run into mystery files with no obvious provenance or files that don’t show up in Control Panel or are otherwise hard to get at. And that bring us to my next item.

More strange startup files — mystery .dlls

Terry Dunn’s problem might seem identical to the problem above, but it’s emphatically not.

• “I get messages on my PC every time I boot the system. The messages say I’m missing lprontl.dll and iqosigegobeyeyo.dll.
  
  “I’m very suspicious of this because I can’t find them on the Internet anywhere, and I don’t know what they do. I suspect that they are part of a virus program that I recently encountered on my PC.”
  

Like you, Terry, I could find nothing online about these files. And like you, I suspect malware.

Some cleverly written malicious software disguises itself with randomly-generated filenames. Because no two infected machines will show the same filenames, the malware is harder to identify and remove.

In your specific case, you may have removed most of the malware when you cleaned up your system’s infection, but something still remains that’s calling for the — perhaps now-removed — randomly named files. Here’s what to do:

First, use Windows Search or another search tool to make sure that lprontl.dll and iqosigegobeyeyo.dll are not on your system.

Next, run several different anti-malware scans, one after another, to make sure your system is truly malware-free. Three free sites to try are: McAfee’s Freescan, Trendmicro’s HouseCall, and Symantec’s Security Check.

When all scans agree that your PC is clean, and if the file missing messages still appear at start-up, Windows’ System Configuration utility can help. It’s called MSCONFIG and is included in all versions of Windows. The XP version is shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1. Windows’ built-in MSCONFIG utility gives you fine control over what goes on during start-up.

Use MSCONFIG to selectively and temporarily disable start-up-related software, one at a time. When you’ve disabled the component that’s calling for lprontl.dll and iqosigegobeyeyo.dll, the start-up error messages relating to those files will go away. You can then permanently remove the offending software by uninstalling it or simply by deleting its files.

Microsoft offers a thorough MSCONFIG how-to in MS Support article 310560, “How to troubleshoot configuration errors by using the System Configuration utility in Windows XP.” Scroll down the page to Advanced troubleshooting and follow the steps under Selective startup.

Other versions of MSCONFIG work almost identically to XP’s; the same basic process can be used to control the startup software in any version of Windows!

Have more info on this subject? Post your tip in the WS Columns forum.

Fred Langa is a senior editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He was formerly editor of Byte Magazine (1987–91), editorial director of CMP Media (1991–97), and editor of the LangaList e-mail newsletter from its origin in 1997 until its merger with Windows Secrets in November 2006.

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