Windows 10: Gibberish or question marks ? in some folder and file names

The File Explorer windows 10 on my Lenovo Laptop shows at least one folder with music files in which the folder and file names appear in Greek/gibberish characters. Some pdf file names appear as question marks within a diamond shape! Most probably originally all these have Hebrew names. There may be additional Hebrew? folders/files with the name problem, which I did not yet come through. In contrast, some other pdf and music files are OK/readable.


The language setting is English by default with Hebrew language pack.


I have screened the Internet and tried out all kinds of changes in language settings among which for UNI-code and non-Unicode programs, have made a restore and uninstall restore, to check whether this occurred due to an update; added/replaced the Windows fonts; etc., etc., but to no avail.


Perhaps someone may suggest another and working solution.


Thanks, James

:)

 

The folder names on my external hard drive have turned to gibberish

I have a nearly new portable external hard drive which is organized into 30 or 40 folders, each with further files in it. The names of the folders on this hard drive have turned to gibberish and I have no idea how to fix this problem. Here is a screen cap showing the problem:




For what it's worth the folder names are also gibberish when I view them from a command prompt. And here's what happens if I click on one of the folders to see what's in it:





I've tried running Avast and MalwareBytes scans but they don't find anything wrong.

Is there anything I can do to repair my folder names and access the files once again?

I've only had the external hard drive a few weeks.

 

The folder names on my external hard drive have turned to gibberish

I plugged it into another laptop and the folder names were gibberish there too. I ran chkdsk and it found many errors. I ran chkdsk /f and it found the same errors. The errors referred to lost chains and cross-linked chains. After doing the "repairs", my PortableHD02 folder had disappeared entirely!!!

Just for interest sake, I copied a small folder with pictures in it onto the hard drive and found that I *could* see the files in it and the names were not gibberish. But it seems that I've lost EVERYTHING in the folder that I wanted to keep.

What the **CK caused this problem and why did everything I do to fix it just make it worse???

 

Generating a .txt based file list in Windows 7

I want to be able to generate a .txt file that lists all the files and folders in a specific folder on my PC, but don't know the name of any programs that do that. Searched on google a bit and came up with this guide, but it's for XP and I can't seem to find some of the folder options to modify the .bat file. Any suggestions? Thanks

http://www.theeldergeek.com/file_list_generator.htm

EDIT: The .bat file will do what I want if it is in the folder I want to do it in, but the option I want to add is having the right click option that it shows.