[Wylug-help] Woe is me! I am undone! Semi OT

[Anne Wilson]

I had a cpu fan failure which appears to have caused other damage before I
could power down, so I had to rebuild with a new mobo, cpu and ram.  Since I
had to start again I installed Mandrake 10 with a 2.6 kernel - and all the
adjustments that are needed when getting a new distro/kernel to behave as you
want.

Then I discovered that data which had been in vfat partitions is unreadable.
Not all of it - which is really odd.  One partition looks completely empty.
That is a blow, but not life-threatening.  The other one is much more
serious.  I can see directories, and some of those directories contain data.
Unfortunately the half-dozen files that I need were all in the top level
directory, and I can see no files at all there.  It's hard to formulate a
strategy when you can't understand what is causing the problem.

Unbelievable, the old box onto which I had put a backup of the big file - that
took me 1.5 days to prepare - had a hard drive failure at the same time.

Has anyone seen a situation like this?  The only thing I can think of now is
to use the existing old windows partition to reinstall windows, then see if I
can put an undelete app onto that partition (the data is not on that
partition).  If Mandrake can't see the data there doesn't seem any chance
that Knoppix could.  I know it's a slim chance that it's only the naming
system that has gone wrong, but I can't think of anything else, and I'm now
desperate.

Anne
--
Registered Linux User No.293302
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