My external 1tb usb drive appears empty after opening with ubuntu

Asked by Jon McKenzie

   I am new to Linux.I have a muliple boot system with windows 7 on one drive and Ubuntu on another. I have transfered video files etc many times from Linux to windows by sending them to my external hdd them rebooting and moving them to windows so I can watch them on my tv or use my windows video editting software.Last night however as soon as I opened it the disk appeared empty.I was able to transfer what I wanted but about 120gb of files have disappeared. I assume it did something when it mounted.Can I somehow repair this and get my files back? This sounds similar to a problem with windows a few years back -----Thanks---Jon

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Solved by:
Rajinder Sandhu
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Ashit Gajwani (ashitgajwani) said :
#1

Jon, do you see your drive listed when you issue the following command
$ sudo fdisk -l

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Jon McKenzie (watever54) said :
#2

  no . It just tells me that the drives are referred to as dev1,2 or whatever.I used the sudo to list the partitions and again it just wants me to specify which drive. This is an iomega usb external 1tb hdd.It always shows up on my desktop as a folder.Always before the folder had all my stuff in it but now it's empty.when I right click it gives me the choice to 'safely remove' or 'unmount'.The only thing in the folder is a recycle bin

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said :
#3

Can you have the partition mounted (You don't mount drives and neither does windows. Windows simply calls them (incorrectly) drives) and give the output of:

sudo fdisk -l; mount

Thanks

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Best Rajinder Sandhu (sandy744) said :
#4

is your drive visible in windows ?
And you have windows7 and linux why do you need to copy to external hdd and then paste the files in windows partitions/ drives. Do copy all the data directly to a common partition and keep all the data there....make this partition as ntfs or fat32 then let linux copy all the data here and when you open windows select this partition, pick up the data for playback or editing as you wish....I do that way on daily basis never found any problem.

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Jon McKenzie (watever54) said :
#5

yes it's visible. I used some data recovery software and got everything back,althougth a couple of the movies no longer play.. IThought I was using it as I common partition because when I opened it in either windows or ubuntu everything was there for me to acces as I wished,perhaps slower because it was using the usb but accessable from both systems. Except the last time when I accessed it with ubuntu the files disappeared . I do have some internal hdd space where I can make a partition to use just for swapping files. I liked using the external because I can take it with me to another location I spend time at where I have a very similar system but I think I'll just back up the stuff I really don't want to lose before I open it in Linux again. Like I said I'm new to Linux,I like it better but this is the second time I've had bad things happen with a usb drive. anyway it's working for now..Thanks folks----sincerly Jon

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Jon McKenzie (watever54) said :
#6

Thanks Rajinder Sandhu, that solved my question.