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Hello

I have just had all data disappear from NTFS volumes on three internal drives (one new), while working in Ubuntu 12.04, on my near-new hi-spec'ed Windows 7/Ubuntu box. Everything was fine until I rebooted the box after installing some software and all the data (about 4 TB) was gone. The patitions are still there, but they show (in Ubuntu and Windows 7) as completely empty (apart from the System Volume Information folder). Data in the Linux volumes, and two connected USB drives, was unaffected.

I've had a quick look with TestDisk and see some old deleted files and a large number of files named "inode-xxxxxx", with file sizes that suggest they are the original files. I know it may be possible to coppy these files elsewhere and rename them, but that will be a very onerous job.

I haven't written anything to the volumes since this happened, and only run the Windows disk check without the "fix" option. Can anyone suggest another approach?

Cheers and thanks for any help

Press 'c' to copy the files. If you want to copy the whole directory, select the directory entry '.' and press 'c'

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, no directories are ahown! But I have spent many hours copying and renaming the "inode" files and have recovered most of the missing data. How the original event occurred at all remains a worrying mystery.