Mounting a non-empty directory
 

Ok, I have simple questions, but cannot seem to find any definite answers.

I am running RH 7.1 dual boot with WinME. The short end of the story is this. I used Linux to back up some documents for Win and reinstalled windows, no that is not the problem. After I got everything running again, I extracted the files from a zip file within Linux to my /dos partition. Without realizing it, the drive partition was not mounted at the time. The files made it to their destination, but not to the actual drive.

I mounted the /dos partition only to find my newly extracted files were gone. Based upon other suggestions, I simply unmounted the drive in hopes that the files were still there. No luck. To make a long story short, the files are not avaliable within the *.zip any longer, and I need them back.

Is there possibly some fancy thing that RH is doing when mounting and unmounting with files that may be in a non empty mount point? Is it recoverable, or did I just trash the files?

I read the man page for mount and it says that as long as the device is mounted, the files and directories will be invisible. It seems to indicate that when the device is unmounted that everything will reappear. But, in your case it doesn't seem to.

Maybe it's a permission problem. Try changing the permissions on /dos. Maybe chmod 555 /dos. Then do a ls /dos. If you're lucky, your files will appear.