I recently put peppermint 3 on my old desktop. I put in an old hd. I booted up peppermint one to make sure the hd wasn't corrupted. Everything was fine. all files showed up. When I put peppermint 3 on and created a new partition the files were still there to my knowledge. I did not format the old partition just made it a little smaller. Now when I go to check the partition that all my files were on ( using as a storage partition ) they are not there, they were replaced with three folders and nothing is there. Please someone help me if there is a way to recover the files that would be great. i thought i had lost all the files on this hd before but they were still there.

type find / -name nameofsomefile (if you know name of some file, some part of filename is enough, like : "find / -name ZZtop" even if the filename is ZZ TOP - Star Mark Greatest Hits CD2 - 11 - .It's Only Love.mp3) or type "ls" or "ls > contentofHD.txt" (if you're in home dir it writes the main folders/files into textfile so you'll see if they're really here

How did you make it smaller and what are the new folders?

I used gparted, the storage is an ext4 logical , the os partition is primary and then the swap. To make it smaller i moved the end of it closer to the beggining if that makes since. still kinda new to using gparted. kinda new to linux. i've only been recently getting into the guts of it lately. on my netbook it just ran.

etc. lost+found. and i believe the last one is media. i'm not near my desktop currently but i think thats what the folders are

Post the output of the command
fdisk -l

Those directories together do not make sense but the lost+found does mean it was formatted with a linux file system. Hopefully you are looking at the wrong partition but it is possible that some of the data was overwritten.

testdisk and photorec are a couple of tools that can find files. It would be best to work from a live CD to keep from loosing any more data. If you have enough storage space you can copy the drive to a file via the dd command. You can then play with the file to preserve the drive.

well i typed fdisk-|and got nothing. im sure i input wrong.

edit: sorry fdisk -l and got nothing

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000b434e

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 587204607 293601280 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 * 587204608 617204607 15000000 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 617205758 625141759 3968001 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 617205760 625141759 3968000 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Well I assume that sda1 is the partition in question? What was originally on the disk?

yes it is. music and video files. thought i had lost all these files years ago doing a similar thing. low and behold they were still there. that was when i first started using linux. a little better at it now

Curious. It isn't obvious if you made a mistake. As stated you might have some luck running testdisk or photorec.

ok well thanks for the ideas. ill give an update if i find what i did wrong

Ok bro best of luck

well update is i still have no idea what i did wrong. but its ok i now have a fresh disk to work with