ERROR_FILE_CORRUPT (0X00000570) – File or Directory Corrupted and Unreadable

1. Bad Sectors on Your Hard Drive – The Most Common Cause

Nine times out of ten, this error means your hard drive is dying. Not the file itself — the physical platter where it lives. Had a client last month who thought her Word doc was gone forever. Turned out the drive had a bunch of bad sectors. Ran chkdsk, and boom — Windows moved the data to a good spot.

Here's the fix: open Command Prompt as Administrator. Don't use the regular one — it won't let you run chkdsk properly. Right-click Start, choose Command Prompt (Admin) or Windows PowerShell (Admin). Then type:

chkdsk C: /f /r

Replace C: with your drive letter. The /f flag tells chkdsk to fix errors. /r finds bad sectors and recovers readable data. It'll ask you to schedule a scan on next restart if it's your system drive. Say yes, then reboot.

Let it run. This can take hours — especially on a big drive. Do it overnight. When it finishes, check if you can open the file again. If not, the data might be in a folder called found.000 on the root of that drive. Look for .chk files there — you can rename them to .doc or .jpg or whatever the original was.

One warning: if chkdsk reports a lot of bad sectors, back up everything you can right away. That drive is on its last legs. I've seen drives fail completely a week after showing this error.

2. File System Corruption – NTFS Got Messed Up

Sometimes the drive is fine, but the file system table — the index that tells Windows where files are — gets scrambled. This usually happens after a power outage, a crash, or yanking out a USB drive without safely removing it.

For this, chkdsk without the /r flag is faster. Run:

chkdsk C: /f

If that doesn't help, try the System File Checker. It checks Windows system files, not your data files, but sometimes a corrupted system file can throw this error for user files too. Run this in an admin command prompt:

sfc /scannow

Let it finish. It'll replace any bad system files from a cached copy. If it finds corruption but can't fix it, follow up with:

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

That fixes the system image itself. Then run sfc again. I've seen DISM fix chkdsk failures that nothing else could touch.

3. The File Itself Is Corrupted – Not the Drive

Rare, but possible. A file can get corrupted during download, while copying, or from a buggy program saving it wrong. You'll know this is the case if chkdsk reports zero bad sectors and no file system errors.

For this, you need data recovery tools. Don't buy fancy stuff — try Recuva first. It's free and works for most cases. Here's the trick: don't run Recuva on the same drive where the corrupted file lives if possible. That could overwrite the data you're trying to save.

If Recuva doesn't work, there's TestDisk from CGSecurity. It's command-line, but it's powerful. It can rebuild a lost partition table or recover deleted files from a corrupted drive. I've used it to pull back files from drives that Windows wouldn't even mount.

For a single corrupted file, you can also try opening it in a hex editor like HxD. But that's for advanced folks — you'd need to know the file format to fix the bytes manually. Not something I'd suggest for most people.

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