I have a nice little redhat 9 system that I intended to make into an MP3 server. I convinced my wife to MOVE her entire collection of mp3s onto it. (it's a lot)

I installed a second drive (80 gigs!), mnt'd it to a directory called /media right off of /, and things were just find for a couple of weeks while I was tweaking it (I intended to move it to living room, connect to stereo, etc)

I got no clue what happened (I suspect her friend may have bumped it while she was visiting!) but when I rebooted the machine, two things were obvious:

a) I can no longer get a graphical interface to come up but

b) the drive I had devoted to mp3s showed NO MP3s, but only
lost+found

I absent-mindedly (I'm a clueless newbie) ran fdisk and repartioned the drive and rebooted. I did NOT reformat.

The machine is exclusively a redhat machine (not dual boot)

Am I screwed? Is my wife going to KILL ME?

I stand ready to answer any questions you might have. I have a few of my own...

what the heck is lost+found? Why is it suddenly on that partition?

What can I do to RECOVER the drive as it was before lost+found appeared??

here is contents of fstab:

LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,r
o 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /media ext3 defaults 1 2

somebody please give me a magic command I can type! If my wife loses these files I am gonna sooooo lose any street cred I have w/ her...

Gary

Lost and found was put there when the disk was formatted. I don't really know what it does, but maybe your mp3's are in there?
Maybe try:
chmod 777 /media/*
?
What does : dmesg | grep hd
give?

Maybe try:
chown yourname(really-your username) /media

When you rebooted, did the PC do a file system check?
If repairs were made the lost files will be in lost+found.

Which drive did you repartition?

Is hdc1 being mounted?

here is the result of dmesg | grep hd

Kernel command line: ro root=LABEL=/ hdb=ide-scsi
ide_setup: hdb=ide-scsi
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd800-0xd807, BIOS settings: hdaMA, hdbMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0x9800-0x9807, BIOS settings: hdcio, hddio
ide2: BM-DMA at 0x9808-0x980f, BIOS settings: hdeio, hdfio
hda: WDC AC310200R, ATA DISK drive
hdb: SONY CD-RW CRX140E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: ST380021A, ATA DISK drive
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: task_no_data_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hda: task_no_data_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 20044080 sectors (10263 MB) w/512KiB Cache, CHS=1247/255/63, UDMA(33)
hdc: attached ide-disk driver.
hdc: host protected area => 1
hdc: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=155061/16/63, UDMA(100)
hda: [EZD] [remap 0->1] [1247/255/63] hda1 hda2 hda3
hdc: hdc1
hdb: attached ide-scsi driver.

The system was working fine - until one day when I returned from work, rebooted (I *think* there was a power outage) and boom! No Xwindows, and hard drive had lost+found in it...

It occurs to me that the system may not have been able to "find" the drive and somehow pointed lost+found to the mapping (ie /media now points to /lost+found) Does that make sense to anyone or otherwise ring a bell?

also - Michael

I didn't notice if the system did a file check - if it did - then it did so quickly and I didn't notice.

I repartitioned hdc1, the drive that contained only data and was mapped to /media

gary

Acronis Recovery Expert might be able to help. The website says it can recover partitions, including Linux ext3. Don't know if it is any good, I haven't used it, just found it with Google. Look here:

http://www.freeware-guide.com/html/acronis.html

It's the last item on the page. It seems you may need to make a bootable disk on a Windows machine, then use it to boot yours (ARE claims to be OS-independent).

If you want a good drive-checking program, there is a good one at Gateway here:

http://support.gateway.com/support/d...=all&chkWord=1

I suggest you get version 5.07. gwscan is made by Maxtor (from memory) but will happily work on other brands.

If you want to stick with Seagate, you can get SeaTools from here:

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/B7a.html

Seatools is similar to gwscan, but it doesn't have the facility to zero the drive (write zeros to each drive location) if that is required to restore it to proper operation.

Like Acronis, these two disk tools require a Windows machine to create a bootable floppy, which then does not need an installed OS to work.