Why won't my system now show the directories and files in /media/sda7?

winger9 · 06-03-2014, 04:17 PM

Summary:

Could you tell me please if there is a way to restore the directories and files
beneath /media/sda7 that are no longer being shown by my file manager or ls?

My system is Debian.

Many thanks, John.

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Full Details:

Please could you help me out of this fix. I have a spare partition on /dev/sda7
(428 Gb), and have been storing files and directories on it (mainly video
files). "mount" shows the setup as

/dev/sda7 on /media/sda7 type reiserfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime)

I access /media/sda7 using my file manager (pcmanfm). Until earlier today,
pcmanfm has happily let me create new directories and files beneath
/media/sda7, such as /media/sda7/vids/horizon.mp4. But now, when I specify for
example the directory /media/sda7/vids in pcmanfm, I get the message "The
specified directory is not valid". Now, none of the directories or files beneath
/media/sda7 are displayed (the file list window is blank). Also "ls" in a terminal shows no
directories or files beneath /media/sda7.

I have an idea that the reason might be because shortly before this started
happening, I had launched the "GParted" disc partitioning utility. I did this
to try and see how much disc space I'd used up on /media/sda7. I used GParted
because du and df were showing zero and very little used disc space respectively, but I reckon
the usage should be about 10 Gb.

I didn't carry out any actions in GParted - I just looked at what it was
displaying, then exited.

The thing is, I've got about 200 video files (mostly mp4) on /media/sda7, and I
dearly don't want to lose them.

Could you tell me please if there is a way to restore the directories and files?

I'm leaving the laptop powered on in case I'll lose everything if I shut down.

soldersplash · 06-03-2014, 06:49 PM

Have you tried unmounting and then re-mounting it? I'd check it's entry in fstab first though.

Code:

cat /etc/fstab

Code:

umount /media/sda7

"man umount" explains how to use the unmount command.

Code:

mount /media/sda7

"man mount" explains how to use the mount command.

Let us know what happens if you try that.

Beryllos · 06-04-2014, 03:05 PM

Most likely the file system is not mounted. Depending on your setup, you might still see the mount point, /media/sda7, and it would look like an empty directory. The df command is one way to see what is mounted. For example, this is what I get:

Code:

$ df
Filesystem                                              1K-blocks       Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                                                   19222656    4661328  13584792  26% /
udev                                                        10240          0     10240   0% /dev
tmpfs                                                      203964        828    203136   1% /run
/dev/disk/by-uuid/9cbb555d-0b36-4482-8b67-3ba05bfc3338   19222656    4661328  13584792  26% /
tmpfs                                                        5120          0      5120   0% /run/lock
tmpfs                                                     1227940      26048   1201892   3% /run/shm
/dev/sda6                                               130533956   25818468  98084732  21% /home
$

If the output of df doesn't show /dev/sda7 (or /media/sda7), try what soldersplash wrote in the previous post. From what you wrote, you always see your files in /media/sda7, which means /etc/fstab has an entry for it, and with that, soldersplash's umount and mount commands should work fine.

Soadyheid · 06-05-2014, 09:03 AM

It used to be the convention that additional external disks were mounted on /mnt but these days /media appears to be the preferred place to mount external USB drives. CD/DVD ROMS, SD and other memory cards, etc.
You haven't booted with some external media installed/attached which has caused something else to be defined as /media/sda7?
Then again, it looks like you made a mount point /media/sda7 or am I reading that wrong?

My

Like the guys say, what do you get from

Code:

$ df

Play Bonny!

I've just re-read this and I'm probably talking mince.