Yesterday, Colin said that I should try burning an Ubuntu 9.04 CD and putting that in my poor broken desktop and running it without changing the computer, with a view to seeing if I could get anything from the hard disc that way. It seemed worth a try.

When we ran the CD, and Ubuntu loaded (has to run in safe mode, for some reason), the hard disk was visible and the data was all there! Woo hoo! Colin said I should zip up my data and save it onto a USB drive. I did that, using Ubuntu’s native archiving program, but there was an error message about it not being being able to do it right, and the file said it was 20-odd GB, but the USB drive only holds 8 GB. Colin was most suspicious. And it turned out he was right to be: when I put the USB drive into another computer, it turned out everything was not really there like it said it was. So Colin suggested using his spare external hard drive.

I wish he’d thought of using his spare external drive before, because now, when I look at the broken hard disc in Ubuntu, the directories are all still there, but the files are not. I also wish I’d checked the files before I attempted to zip them up to make sure they were actually ok as well as being there.

But what I don’t understand is why zipping them up made them all disappear. Is it that they weren’t actually there in one piece to start with? And why are all the directories ok?

Automagically-generated possibly-related posts:

• Another tale of lost data woe
• Ubuntu; the next step
• Ubuntu on a USB flash drive thingymawidget?
• Another Ubuntu update: software

categories: Nature and Science and Tech
tags: breaking things, Colin, computing, mending things