Data loss - HELP!

Relative newbie. Having run Mandrake 10.1 for several months I had a few problems so decided to try the much talked about Ubuntu. During the install I was careful to format only the root partition and the swap partition - I kept the data partition intact. So I installed Ubuntu, but as yet it's not stable enough for me - several problems with hardware detection etc, so I re-installed Mdk 10.1.

But guess what, no sign of my data partition in /mnt (though my NTFS partitions are there).

This is not the end of the world, as I did a backup a couple of months ago, but I'd really like to get back the data if possible, if only to save having to load it all back on from CDs

Am I missing something obvious here? Any help would be much appreciated.

Your data is intact in /home unless you told Mandriva's installer to reformat all partitions.

Any idea which partition your data was on? e.g. /dev/hda2? And what was its mount point - /data?

Thanks for the response - it was hda9 but I'm not sure what the mount point was. I definitely didn't format the partition so I guess the data is there, if only I could get at it!

Could you post the results of

Code:

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mount | grep 'hda9'

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Hopefully there will be no ouput from that command (which will mean you're not mounting it anywhere at the moment, which will by extension probably mean you didn't accidentally overwrite it).

In that case, just create a new /mnt/data (or whatever) directory and mount /dev/hda9 there.

Hi Anomie, and thanks. No output from that, so maybe there is hope. Being a newbie, I'd be very grateful if you could talk me through the procedure of creating a new mount point for hda9.

As root:

Code:

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cd /mnt

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Code:

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mkdir data

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Code:

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mount -t ext3 /dev/hda9 /mnt/data

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Note: Only use this if your filesystem is ext3. If not, use the appropriate filesystem. (You may remember choosing the filesystem when you created it. I am not sure what the default is for your distro, but ext3 is common.)

Finally, you can browse /mnt/data.

Followed your instructions - and there it was! You are my hero! Many thanks.

De nada. Keep at it.