Ubuntu

All files in NTFS hard drive gone while in Ubuntu

Asked by DennisVogt

I was deleting files from a Zip disk in Ubuntu. The system was having trouble with deleting the trash of the Zip disk. I closed out the trash operation. Then I noticed that the entire contents of a NTFS hard drive that only has our personal files (no operating system), suddenly had no files. I booted up into Windows XP and no files show up there either. I believe that the data is still there but before I try to rebuild from backups, is there a way that I can make the data show up in a file browser again?
Thanks,
Dennis

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#1

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

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Best Tom (tom6) said : 		#2

Hi

It looks as though you have accidentally deleted files from the wrong drive? I am having a few issues with trying to work out which partition is being referred to in Ubuntu these days, it all used to be so incredibly easy but suddenly seems to have been made quite complicated.

So the first thing is to stop doing any writes to either drive until you can work out which is which. It sounds as tho you don't have to panic and shutdown your machine in order to use a LiveCd for this because the data wasn't on the drive/partition that Ubuntu is installed onto. Hopefully something in that data-recovery guide should prove useful
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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Vihar (vmankov) said : 		#3

Yeah, for me it's very serious from a data loss point of view. Jump directly to Tom's advice, please.

And may be prior to it you try to see the files in that drive with the LiveCD of Ubuntu?

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DennisVogt (unclegoodguy) said : 		#4

Thanks Tom, that solved my question.

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DennisVogt (unclegoodguy) said : 		#5

I used the ntfsundelete command to recover files. It didn't work well. I was hoping to get the file structure back the way it was. I tried to undelete all the .jpg files and I could recover approximately 20% of them. This whole situation is very strange. I am going to get a replacement hard drive and keep this one to experiment with. Thanks for your help.
Dennis

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#6

If you have an old machine with an old hard-drive or if you have a decent USB stick or two then using LiveCd sessions with persistent image and using the old-drive and USBs to save to rather than the weirdly corrupted drive might help fill the time until you get a new hard-drive. There might be some local company that specialises in data-recovery although they do often charge quite a lot so it's worth getting a quote before seriously considering this option. Sometimes they reduce their charge if it was a linux system because they are so much easier to deal with - everything is in the /home folder, no need to hunt all over everywhere.

Anyway, good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#7

Oh excellent. This wasn't the drive your bootable Ubuntu is on and you also have zip-drives :)) Excellent.

You hadn't setup your corrupted drive to have a /home partition did you? Ubuntu is all working fine off the 1 hard-drive? If not you might want to post a question about how to create a /home partition as i haven't a clue about all that messing around in fstab - i would have to do a refreshing install but using a couple of neat tricks to fool the installer :)

I'm glad i finally remembered you still have things pretty well sorted despite the data loss :)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

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DennisVogt (unclegoodguy) said : 		#8

The corrupted drive doesn't have any operating systems nor the Ubuntu /home partition on it.
Thanks,
Dennis

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Tom (tom6) said : 		#9

Do you have a 3rd old drive somewhere that you can test out data-recovery skills on without risking harming the valuable drive? If so this guide might be good to try
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

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Lasse Buck (lasse-buck) said : 		#10

I had a similar experience with Ubuntu ruining an NTFS disk :-(

Short story:
I had attached an external NTFS harddisk via USB. It was automatically mounted in Ubuntu, and I started moving (not copying) folders with thousands of files to local folders in Ubuntu. Suddenly, the external drive appeared empty, and I found out that the NTFS partition was no longer recognised when booting from Windows.

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DennisVogt (unclegoodguy) said : 		#11

Thanks for sharing your experience. I purchased a new hard drive and formatted it as FAT32. When it happened to me, I wasn't even accessing the NTFS hard drive. I was deleting files from a Zip disc. I was planning on copying some files from the NTFS drive to the Zip disc.
Dennis