I fired up the computer today just to be met by a message saying that the Google Chrome settings file is corrupt.
Oh well, I thought, and googled it. And to my surprise nobody seems to be getting this error, I only found one forum thread about it, with no real solution.
So, does anybody know why this happened? I've never seen anything like it before. All of my settings, extensions, login-data etc are gone! Everything… The only things left are my bookmarks, although, some of them are gone too.
Any ideas how to fix it? Why did it happen?
Best Answer
For the why: because you're unlucky. More seriously, many things can cause a file corruption. It may come from a power failure during a write (even if you didn't notice it, you computer may not even rebooted), or a software bug in google chrome causing it to write garbage to its files.
It could also be an NMR Spectrometer operating too close to your computer (well, depending on where you work, but it happened to a friend of mine and I couldn't resist) .
For the how to fix it:
You should make backups of everything is important to you before this kind of things happens. This includes your mail directory, browser settings, cat pictures, etc.
I'm sorry because this is probably not what you want to hear. But remember that you only lost one file. Next time it may be your entire hard disk.
If you are very (I mean very) motivated, you could still save your corrupted file before overwriting it (maybe it's too late), then look at google chromium source code to learn things about the file format, and then try to extract as much information as you can from your damaged file.