I did something bad....

[cougar97536]

hey all... I seem to have made a very bad mistake, hoping someone can help do some damage control. I just took the leep, after vista drove me to it and switched over to Open Suse 10.3. I then started moving all my old files off my external HD into my home dir. all was going fine till the power went off. I was cutting and pasting. now the external (formatted ext3), while claiming to have space used (250gb), doesn't show any contents when I browse it. any help getting all my data back would be much appreciated.
have a great one,
Christopher King

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

I don't know if it will work, or not, but you can check out TestDisk and PhotoRec. Maybe one or both of them can pull in all the lost data. They are made to work together:

TestDisk - CGSecurity

PhotoRec - CGSecurity

[gogalthorp]

While booting press esc to get a terminal view of the boot and see if there are any reported errors while mounting the partitions.

You also might want to run the fsck (File System ChecK) option in the recover menu from the cd/dvd. It will tell you if the file system is ok and do some repairs. Note you can only repair unmounted partitions. Type man fsck at a command line for more info.

Also it might be corrupted low level sectors, so it would be wise to run a low level disk scan/recovery program. You can generally get one from the drive maker. I use SpinRite but it is not a free program.

[cougar97536]

I will try rebooting and doing the above mentioned repair from the install disc. thanks a lot for your help. if anyone else has any other ideas, I could love to hear them.
Have a great one,
Christopher King

[cougar97536]

thanks all, my data is back... I just had to use the fsck from the recovery disk to scan my removable disk... and told it to fix the errors it found...
Have a good one, and thanks alot for good ideas,
Christopher King