Windows 7 chkdsk renamed Windows folder to Found001xxxxxxx

That's pretty heavy corruption if that occurred after a chkdsk. I'd personally look at pulling data off the system and rebuilding it, but you are certainly welcome to rename those folders as you see fit.

My reaction to that level of corruption is caused by the fact that if the drive got corrupted badly enough to lose the windows folder, that drive is likely to die fairly soon.

The funny thing about it is that the chkdsk was done with the drive connected to another PC as an external drive.  In the end, it crashed because it could not find enough free space to handle the corrupted sectors,  I wasn't expecting to get it to boot when I put it back in the laptop.  What are the problems with just renaming it back to Windows?  I assume I would have to do it connected to the other PC.  PRoblem is, the laptop is used to control major production equipment.  The programs to control it at this point will only work with Windows 7  without.

The FOUND files are (can be) CHKDSK results.  

Get what you can with a bootable USB key as suggested above.

Unless you believe the disk is fundamentally sound (I do not think so), replace it and then rebuild.

Doing a wipe and rebuild isn't really a great option.  The Programs that the client is running cannot just be reinstalled onto a new OS.  The vendor of the software wants over $10K  to upgrade to the latest version and won't support the existing version being re-installed.

The client is taking a huge risk in trying to repair this system. So you may need to reconsider that.

Given the criticality, I am guessing they will be system images around (probably quite a few, going back a while).

Maybe best to replace the disk, and just restore one of those.

Alan.

i have had this happen also with a chkdsk - and was never able to repair it.
what i do now, when disk sectors are suspect - is this :
run the short disk diagnostic from the manufacturer to be sure the drive operates ok
then run HDDRegenerator (not free) to repair the disk sectors  : http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html      
there are very few that are no t repaired for me

and you can then take an image to Ensure your operations in case of trouble

At this point - I do agree that replacing the hard drive is the best course but I am going to clone the drive first - then try fixing the file structure on the new drive - worst case, I end up having to start from scratch.

that is a very good decision - but it comes a bit late to be 100% effective  :=))

Thanks for all the advice.   As much as I wanted to try and fix the drive, I ended up cloning the drive then copying the files from the Found001xxx  folder to the Windows folder and then nothing would boot,  

I finally gave in and Reinstalled Windows on a new hard drive and will end up having to try reinstalling the apps then copying over the data files to the appropriate folders.  Looks like about 20 hours - Unfortunately, al the programs are tied to an individual PC  so we have to go to the Software company and get the new license codes which typically takes about 3 hours each.  They have to verify that we are not just trying to load them on a 2nd machine

I am not sure why you only selected one solution of many that suggested replacing the drive

John  - All comments were taken into consideration.  I was looking for something that may have saved hours of work and thousands of dollars. Having been in the business for 30 years, I was well aware of the risks and was always intending to replace the actual drive. I was looking more for an out of the box solution that may have saved me time.  In the end, no such solution was forthcoming but I felt that Alan simply confirmed what I probably thought would be the only way to go in the end.