How to acces the ' lost+found ' folder

Forums › Linux › How to acces the " lost+found " folder

abena

42 posts

Geek
Inactive user

#18534 14-Jan-2008 08:43

Hi people!

This is what I did: I touch the /etc/fstab file and I ruin it, so, I had to reinstall ubuntu in another partition, but, the partition where used to be my old and ruin ubuntu is now with just one folder " lost+found " it is about 2Gb, but I cannot access it, when I open it, it seems to be empty!

How can I open it, to recovery my data????

Thanks

foobar

186 posts

Master Geek

#104744 14-Jan-2008 13:23

First, a little bit of information about the lost+found folder: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-229143.html

I'm not sure what the best course of action is here, but I would recommend that before attempting anything else, you might want to ask someone who knows. A good place to go are the Ubuntu support forums. There are a lot of very knowledgeable people, who might know what to do in that situation.

You can find them here: http://www.ubuntuforums.com

Ask there and see what you get as an answer. Hopefully that will help...

The blog: foobar on computers, software and the rest of the world: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar

Face

19 posts

Geek

#106024 21-Jan-2008 21:59

Your first option is to repair the /etc/fstab file. It's actually a lot simpler than it looks and if you Google fpr a guide I'm sure you'll find something pretty quickly. I won't go into it now because that's not your question.

What you need to do is copy all of the files from the lost and found folder to another location (say, your home directory) as root, change their permissions to make them user-writable and salvage what you need. Run these commands, substituting in actual paths where necessary.:

$ su -
# cp -r /path/to/lost+found ~/recovered
# chmod -R 755 ~/recovered

Then have a look in ~/recovered and take what you need. Note that you might not find the files you're after, since the contents of lost+found are simply bits and pieces put there by fsck.