I have been running Mandrake 10 CE for several months and decided to change to 10.1. Previously a new install has preserved the old information in /home only reformatting the directors that have been selected in the install. This time all data has been lost. It was not backed up because I was unable to get the system to communicate with other computers on the same network - but that is another story.

any possible advice on if it is possible to recover the lost directories and files. I have read the recovery solutions but these seem to refere to lost directories and or deleted files and I am rather frightened to use these until I have consulted others.

Hope that there is someone who can help

Messing about on the river
Ragodin

You know, I'm sort of in a situation like you where I told Mandrake to partition and format other partitions on the drive, yet my old partition from a previous version of Mandrake is gone. When I run the cfdisk or whatever, I can see my partition still being there, with the files on it since it shows it has space used up. However, I cannot mount that partition or see that partition in Mandrake. It's really weird. Good thing I backed up my data so I'm not that in trouble like you are, but I would like to be able to view my files in that partition.

It sounds like you have /home on a seperate drive which was reformatted.

Since this blows away the inode tables chances are VERY small you can do anything with it.

You may want to remove the affected drive and set up a new install of Mandrake.

Download some of the "unerase" and recovery utils from the repositories using urpmi after configuring your sources.

Finally reconnect your old drive but do not mount it, and try running some of these utilities against the drive.

Thanks for the immediate responses

I think though that I have not explained myself clearly. The partition was not reformatted during the install but Mandrake appears to have created a new file structure with the same names at the top of /home/username.

The new structure mounts and shows a small usage where as previously there were many files installed in many directories

Question - are the files still there on the drive? It so how do I find them and recover them

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Messing about on the river

It was reformatted during the install.

The installer does not explicitly remove the /home structure unless the drive is reformatted even when told to use existing partitions.

Remember that this can occur very quickly under Linux.

On the unlikely chance that I'm wrong about this, you can do what I mentioned in my post.

However the sooner you remove this drive from your system the better your chances.