My image file (png, jpf, and jfif) are all looking broken and weird, and there’s a bunch of corrupted files on my USB, what could have caused this and will the corrupted files infect my PC?

Hi AlexBergmann

How are you? I hope you are doing good.

Welcome to Microsoft Community. I am Juliet, an independent advisor. It's my pleasure to help you today. I know how frustrating this may be for you but I'll do my very best to help you :)

DId you make changes on your device prior to this?

have you tried performing SFC scan?

1. In the search box on the taskbar, type Command Prompt, and right-click or press and hold Command Prompt (Desktop app) from the list of results. Select Run as administrator, and then select Yes.

2. Type DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth (note the space before each "/"), and then press Enter. (Note: This step may take a few minutes to start and up to 30 minutes to complete.)

3. After you see a message that says "The operation completed successfully," type sfc/scannow (note the space between "sfc" and "/") and press Enter.

4. After you see a message that says, "Verification 100% complete," type exit.

I hope it helps! Let me know the results.

Please Let me know if you have more questions or the above method didn't work for you, I'll be more than happy to assist you further :)

source:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/usi...

I would also suggest you try to scan your USB. Right-click on the USB icon, then left-click Scan for viruses from the drop-down menu.

so this didn't work, and i checked for viruses using nortion, and there was none

let us ask other advisors for help

Hi Alex,

I am Dave, an Independent Advisor, I will help you with this.

This is not caused by malware or System File Corruption, and those files cannot harm your PC.

The files on that drive have become corrupt, this is usually caused by disconnecting the drive when some process was still accessing the drive, most likely those files will not be repairable, but the drive will be.

Copy all files form that drive into a folder on your PC

Open Command Prompt as Administrator, then run this command and press Enter (Replace D with the correct drive letter):

chkdsk D: /r

That should fix any corruption on that drive, it will however delete any badly corrupted files.