Hi all,
I am fairly new to Linux, and even more so to Ubuntu. Recently whilst playing around with my Samba settings, and shared directories, I somehow managed to incorrectly use the 'mv' command resulting in the data within a directory completly dissapearing.

Initially the problem was the read\write settings for the directory:
/data/Lauren/
This directory wasn't accessible from the various windows machines on my LAN, so after chmoding, etc and using the mv command, to move /data/Lauren to /TheLauren, I somehow managed to come out the other side with no "/data/Lauren" and two new empty directories "/The" and "/Lauren"

Bassicly my question is, will I be able to use data recovery software to track down the original data and its directory structure? or has my data gone elsewhere?

I'm worried that if I attempt to do anything without advise I may run the risk of making matters worse.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
AppleNinja.

Since you used mv, there's a chance that data is still there, just not exactly where you think.
Do you know the name of one file that was in /data/Lauren? If so, as root, do a "find / -name <filename>" to see where it has gone.

Thanks for the quick reply.
None of the files I searched for appear to be on the system anymore. What are the odds that an ext data recovery tool would help??

Depends on the file system. What do you use? What distribution?