Hi,
I formatted (ext4) my sda (250gb) drive using gparted. Next I created a folder on it an moved some files from my ext HD to this folder. Next boot, I go on the HD (sda) and I don't see my folder just "lost+fund" folder is present. According to gparted and "df -h" the HD is not empty and the percentage used represent the total size of files transferred.

Any suggestion how to recover the folder; make it "visible" ?

Thanks in advance.

How are you trying to look at the files? Commandline or gui? Commands given?

Is the drive being properly mounted? In fstab or manually?

Was gparted on a live-cd or installed on the system?

How is the drive connected to the system?

I tried commandline under root& user using "ls -a" and the file manager (gui)

The drive is mounted in fstab like this: Also I tried to umount and remount under a home folder the results are the same.

Gparted was installed on the system

The drive (IDE) is connected to a controller Promise Fast Fx 2200 as JBOD

IF the info above is not enough please let me know

Any suggestions ?

Can you connect the drive to a different machine and see if they are visiable there?

Can you boot a live-cd/usb-stick and see if you can see them? I use System-Rescue-CD

Did you try commenting out the entry in your fstab, restart and then mount it manually with something like

as root # mount /dev/sd?? /mnt/250a (replace /sd?? with your drive/partition info)

What I see different is that the free space increased and now I have just 3gb used on the Hard drive. Very weird stuff.
Anything else I can try before reformat and try to copy again.

No changes

No changes

No changes

One thing you should know is that, if this drive is the same as you are installed on, you should not be doing any kind of formating or partitioning from your install. Could be that you already know this but I thought I should mention it before you do anything again.

If it is the case that they are on the same drive then you should do what ever it is you decide to do from the Live CD.

The entire drive should be unmounted. I currently have 3 drives so all I need to do is switch to an install on another drive.

Thanks for mentioning that widget. I was just assuming that the rssn6 knew that.



What I think I would do is back up your data. Although I personally have never had problems resizing partitions ......... your milage may vary.


Boot a live-cd like the system rescue cd I mentioned before. Do NOT mount the drive.

delete the offending partition

resize the other(s) partitions, just don't make them smaller that the data they contain.

reboot on the drive just to check it

reboot the live-cd

re-resize your partitions back to what you want them to be

mind you this can take a while depending on the size of the dirve


If that dosen't work then I am at a loss other that to wipe the whole drive and start over.

Guys I really appreciate the help, this drive is used to store data, the system is installed on different one. Just want to add, using PartedMagic live-cd I did test on the drive and there were no issues found. I'll post the result after my format.

What size is this drive? There have been some instances where large drives (2TB) have been troublesome in this way.

Breaking it up into smaller partitions seems to help matters.

I use a dual HDD external enclosure for some storage and as a test platform for dev release OS's. Has 2 320gig sata drives in it and I have never had trouble with the thing.

My box has 3x 250gb IDE drives (storage) and 1 x 20gb for the system.

A thought: How did you move the directory and files? (Specifically, did you use a mv or cp command? If you used cp, did you use the -p option to preserve [most of] the file and directory attributes?)

Have you tried to look at the mounted file system as root?

I used the file manager to copy them. Yes I tried to mount the drive as root same think.

Are you looking at the correct drive?

Kind regards

Yes I do.

What happens if you copy new files to the drive?

Kind regards