Change mount /media/username to /home using fstab didn't work

**qianian2** · April 1st, 2020

If possible, I want to recover the contents of my home partition. It was mounted at /media/username by default and I used fstab to mount it at /home. If recovery is impossible, I want to know what I did to lose them. Thanks for any help.

du -sh ~/.[a-Z]*

Code:

4.0K	/home/keizen/.bash_history427M	/home/keizen/.cache
564M	/home/keizen/.config
4.0K	/home/keizen/.gconf
16K	/home/keizen/.gnupg
4.0K	/home/keizen/.ICEauthority
1.6M	/home/keizen/.local
21M	/home/keizen/.mozilla
76K	/home/keizen/.pki
4.0K	/home/keizen/.ssh
0	/home/keizen/.sudo_as_admin_successful
2.4M	/home/keizen/.zoom

I used chmod again to get the following permissions, but there is still no lost + found.

Code:

/home$ ls -alFtotal 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 30 17:48 ./
drwxr-xr-x 24 root   root   4096 Mar 30 13:11 ../
drwxr-xr-x 19 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 31 09:40 keizen/

**TheFu** · April 1st, 2020

Originally Posted by qianian2

If possible, I want to recover the contents of my home partition. It was mounted at /media/username by default and I used fstab to mount it at /home. If recovery is impossible, I want to know what I did to lose them. Thanks for any help.

Ah .... appears the error was that the HOME directory was mounted too high.

Needed ....
/media/thefu ----> /home/thefu
but it appears this was done:
/media/thefu ----> /home
OR
mkdir /media/home ; mv /media/thefu /media/home/thefu
then mount it.

I’m just guessing there. Does that seem like what happened? No idea what may have happened to the old files. They should have been in /home/ somewhere. Nothing automatic would delete them to my knowledge.

**qianian2** · April 1st, 2020

That's exactly what happened, thank you for explaining. So confusing -- I see /home/keizen but as we saw this is all that's in /home. Any possibility re-mounting it could give access to those contents?

Code:

keizen@Stonau:~$ ls -al ..total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 30 17:48 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root   root   4096 Mar 30 13:11 ..
drwxr-xr-x 19 keizen keizen 4096 Apr  1 08:32 keizen

**TheFu** · April 1st, 2020

Can't hurt to try.

**qianian2** · April 2nd, 2020

The output of TestDisk (sorry I only have an image link) identifies two partitions that can't be recovered. They are identical in size (429786944) but the Start and End are off by 8 each. Does that mean there are two indices and can I recover my files?

Additionally TestDisk says The harddisk seems too small! Check the harddisk size: HD jumper settings, BIOS detection...

Is it possible mounting to /home without deleting the directories there by default caused my desired content to be hidden under the default ones? Any help is appreciated. Also should I clean up this post and re-post?

**TheFu** · April 2nd, 2020

i don't use testdisk. i have "backups" instead, which seem to cause many fewer problems and less prayer is needed.
For dealing with file systems, sometimes it is easiest to boot from a "Try Ubuntu" flash installer and choose "Try Ubuntu" to look at the storage when it isn't actively being used by the running OS.