Files on external HDD not showing....

[newbie-ish]

Hi all. Having a problem - I just did a clean install over my old Mint 17 partition with 18.1 because of some internet-related troubles I was having.

Before I formatted the partition to start over I copied my entire user/root folder to HDD so I'd have all my files and could just paste them into the fresh install.

The problem is that when I click into the external HDD, the folder is there, and the properties say it's the size it's supposed to be, but when you click into it there's nothing there, hidden or otherwise, and the properties tab of the folder also says "no contents". I booted up the Windows partition to check it on another OS, and all the files were there...so they're just not showing up in Mint. Can anyone help me to work out how to make them appear so I can get all my stuff back on to my new installation?

Cheers!

[WharfRat]

With the external HDD attached paste back the results of mount|grep ^/dev

[newbie-ish]

Hey WharlRat, thanks for your reply

The output I get from that (with the "TOSHIBA" one being the extrernal hard drive in question) is:

/dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered)
/dev/sdb1 on /media/user/TOSHIBA EXT type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096,uhelper=udisks2)

[WharfRat]

Do you see any files with ls -lh "/media/user/TOSHIBA EXT"

[newbie-ish]

Just the one folder still unfortunately :-/

[avihai]

just thinking out loud.

if i recall correctly "nodev" flag means you can't mount the device, isn't it ?

[WharfRat]

j
if i recall correctly "nodev" flag means you can't mount the device, isn't it ?

That's not quite right, nodev means character or block special devices will not be interpreted.

Does df -h show any used space for that partition

[newbie-ish]

Yeah it shows it as ~half full which is about right

[WharfRat]

Yeah it shows it as ~half full which is about right

Try unmounting the partition and mounting it with your credentials sudo umount /dev/sdb1

Then create a mountpoint sudo mkdir/media/external

Then mount it with sudo mount -t ntfs-3g -o uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=002,fmask=111 /dev/sdb1 /media/external

Then check it with ls -lh /media/external

[newbie-ish]

Thanks for your detailed suggestions WharlRat, much appreciated. Unfortunately after doing that it still only shows the one folder, same as before

[WharfRat]

Thanks for your detailed suggestions WharlRat, much appreciated. Unfortunately after doing that it still only shows the one folder, same as before

Again with the drive connected using /media/external paste back the results of df -h|egrep 'File|sdb1'

[newbie-ish]

That returns:

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Filesystem           Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1            466G  235G  232G  51% /media/external

[WharfRat]

OK, can you now paste back ls -lh /media/external

[newbie-ish]

Yep, that gets:

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total 24K
drwxrwxr-x 1 user user   0 Jun 28 14:40 System Volume Information
drwxrwxr-x 1 user user 24K Jun 27 19:45 user

[WharfRat]

And what's in ls -lh /media/external/user

[Spearmint2]

Have you tried accessing the HDD as root? Notice the user mode of file manager shows nothing in the root folder, but when I use the file manager in superuser mode, then I can see items in that root folder. If you are going to run commands to access a root owned folder, need to be root, use sudo or gksu where appropriate, or set terminal to sudo su, and then be very careful. Click on image to view full size.

root_superuser_mode.jpg

[newbie-ish]

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ls: reading directory '/media/external/user': Input/output error
total 0

...looks like still nothing?

[newbie-ish]

Have you tried accessing the HDD as root? Notice the user mode of file manager shows nothing in the root folder, but when I use the file manager in superuser mode, then I can see items in that root folder.

Thanks Spearmint, unfortunately that was one of the first things I tried, didn't change anything.

[WharfRat]

Are you sure it was plugged in when you backed-up the files

The other possibility with that Input/output error is that the drive is flying south or the file system is corrupted.

[Spearmint2]

how did you move the folder and files over? Why did you move the /root folder? Were you running your system as root? Was that your user name? You installed 18 already on the same partition you previously had 17 on? If you can't find your files eventually on the HDD, maybe you can find some or all of them using the TestDisk program that's in GParted under the Devices header using it's recovery option.

Upgrade Wharf's suggested command to superuser mode.

Code: Select all

sudo ls -lh /media/external