[SOLVED] Data lost

I booted my system today to find that 300 GB of my data had mysteriously vanished.:eek:. The data was all on an NTFS partition. Strangely the hdd still shows 47% used as if all my data were still there. But the drive is empty! Is there any way of recovering these files? Or is there some other solution? Please help me. It's very important data. I regret not being able to back it all up because I'm unable to buy a new hdd until next month. I've been searching for a solution all day and this is really my only remaining hope.:sad:

Need more information. The more we know the better the help will be.
1)are you duel booting with XP/Vista and Linux ? What OS's ?

1a) if booting with MS OS how does 'Disk Management' list the partition ?

2)are you witting to the NTFS with linux ?

3) is the partition only a data or OS partition ?

4) post output from linux "fdisk -l -u" (-l is a small L) and tell us what partition is what.

Should you decide that the data truly has been lost, check out TestDisk and PhotoRec for possibly recovering it:

TestDisk - CGSecurity

They are the best apps that I'm aware of for data recovery.

Some of us think that NTFS stands for Not There File System... That said (all sarcasm aside), you might want to boot into Windows and try to fix it there. Unfortunately, there isn't any Linux fsck for ntfs that I can find.

I didn't have windows installed so I installed it. I was hoping that wouldn't be necessary but anyway, I'm now trying to recover the data. I'll let u know the outcome as soon as I'm done. Thanks for replying so quickly.

It was an NTFS partition from my previous Win installation. It was a data partition. I'm using recuva to try n restore the data. It's detected some of the files...:p

I was able to recover most of the data though some of the files had gone corrupt.:p Only problem is I won't be able to reinstall Linux for a while as I 'll be very busy.:( Thanks, again, for helping me out.