Hi there.

I'm new to the forum and I have one issue with my HD:

I have one 40GB Maxtor hard disk partitioned as follows:

14GB root directory (Mandriva Linux 2007.1)
2GB swap
20GB /home

The / and /home directories are both reiserfs.

The home partition contained the homes for two users: gaetano/ and sandro/.

When I re-install/update Linux I usually format the root partition only, in order to save all user's data and configurations.

But, this time, after reinstalling, the two user's folders were no longer present and, in place, the following ones are now contained in the home directory:

bin/ etc/ games/ gaetano/ include/ lib/ local/ sbin/ share/ src/ tmp@ X11R6/

The folder gaetano/ belongs to the user I defined during the last installation (defined in the previous install, too) and it is a brand new user folder. The etc/ folder is empty.

These folders take about 3GB of disk space, but the partition manager tells me that 55% of the partition is occupied. 55% of 20GB is about 10GB: the 7GB difference is about the size of the two disappeared home folder.

Could someone help me in understanding what happened?
It seems my data are still present in the partition. Am I right?
Is there any way to recover such data?

I tried reiserfsck and it returned no errors.

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Iscand.

Hya,

How does fdisk looks like?

Happy Penguins!

That is your /usr directory - it somehow ended up on the second partition. What is actually on the first one? Did you assign partitions manually or did you rely on the system to do it for you?

Yes, data can be recovered fairly well if you use photorec - only movies files may come out rather garbled.

Thank you for your answer jay, I'm sorry for this long delay in my reply, but I've been *really* busy in the last weeks.

Unfortunately I didn't solve my issue. This /usr directory is just a copy of the one in the root. My first thought was about a mistake during installation, but this doesn't explain the presence of the home directories. They was there just after the post-install reboot.

By the way, I decided to say goodbye to my data and repartition/format my hard disk.

Unfortunately the old partitions were reiserfs, so I wasn't able to recover them by using photorec.

Thank you for your help.

Iscand.