Vicky Staubly wrote:
On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Kelly J. Morris wrote:
Greetings. I have just managed to lose all my data.
Ouch! I hope I can help...
Vicky - Thanks. I hope that you can, too.
In preparation for upgrading my Linux installation, I bought and
installed a WD USB 500 GB external drive. I copied all my data from
my SuSE 9.2 partition to the external drive. I rebooted to my WinXP
HE partition and saved my data to the same external drive. I then
deleted the old SuSE partition and installed Ubuntu 8.041 LTS where
SuSE had been. I rebooted into Ubuntu and looked for my folders on
the external drive. They are not there or, if they are there, I can't
see them. Only the Windows folders remain.
I assume that, when I saved the Windows folders to the external
drive, they wrote over the files that were already there, i.e. the
folders from my previous SuSE Linux installation that I had saved
there. It was not a case of space - I had saved about 75 GB of files
from my SuSE partition and only about 10 GB of files from Windows
(that I rarely use).
Many external drives come pre-formatted as 1 big FAT32 partition. Did
you leave it like that? Or did you create some kind of Linux partition
(e.g. ext2/ext3, resierfs, jfs, etc.)? Did you just copy the files (as
in a "cp" command, or dragging and dropping from a Gnome/KDE desktop)?
Did you "tar" them (as in "tar -cvf /mnt/external/backup.tar /")? Did
you use some kind of backup program that did it for you?
Yes, the external drive was formatted FAT32. I didn't partition or
format any part of it to ext2 or ext3. I dragged-and-dropped from my
SuSE installation (GNOME) to the drive. (This moved, rather than copied,
these files.Since I was getting ready to delete the source partition, I
didn't think that this made any difference. Boy, was I wrong!) Since 98%
of what I was saving was .doc, .txt, .pdf, .jpg, and .html files, I
thought that I was OK. To be sure, I opened some of the files in their
new external HD location using oOo, GIMP, etc. and I had no problem
opening, modifying, and saving any files.
From the Windows side, what did you do? (The above questions mostly
apply.)
I rebooted into WinXP HE and did the same. Some folders I
copied-and-pasted, on others, I used "Send." My son says that he
thinks that using "Send" rather than drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste
was the culprit, but I dunno ...
In general, you are probably ok, unless you used some program
that assumed it could use the whole external drive for its own
(nefarious) purposes.
I hope so, but nothing I try -- in Ubuntu or in Win -- allows me to
"see" these files, if they are still there. I have run searches in both
Ubuntu and Win, with no success.
What do I try next?
Many thanks. Kelly
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