Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

I had an issue earlier this month with Error 17 (see Super Grub Disk and the Mysterious Error 17). My Ubuntu laptop would not resume properly and I was forced to manually restart it. I did some thorough research on the web yielding a possible fix - fsck. This command - I’m assuming to mean “file system check” - allowed me to “repair” my Ubuntu partition using a Ubuntu LiveCD and terminal. After selecting “yes” to every suggested action that was to be taken by fsck, I rebooted into Super Grub Disk which was able to fix my Grub boot loader. I rebooted again and I discovered that my user name and password didn’t work. From there I did some more reading and realized that I needed to create another user name and password to get access my Ubuntu desktop. I used a LiveCD to get to a terminal and created another user, rebooted back in to my Ubuntu installation and discovered, to my dismay, that my Home folder and many other programs and documents were gone. At that point I knew that some serious rearranging had taken place without my knowledge. Oh, the pangs of being a Linux n00b. I rebooted into my Vista installation and had been using that for a while. I left my Ubuntu partition alone for a week until I could figure how to recover files. I tried running R-Linux from Windows but that yielded no results. I then read an article about the Lost+Found directory and how it works. I checked my L+F directory and there laid a multitude of numbered files and directories that were recovered. That me led to search the directories and I have copied over many of my missing files at this point.

It is said in quite a few articles that the numbered files that are created inside the Lost+Found directory are to be manually recovered and that you would have to search inside each file and observe the size to try and identify what is what. My case was slightly different. While there were numerous amounts of these unidentified files and directories, the files inside the no-name directories were untouched and undamaged. To read how to “manually” recover files in that situation, please see http://www.techworld.com.au/article/214899/unix_tip_rescuing_files_from_lost_found.