I screwed up... bad...

[haywire]

I'm kinda cooky about making backups, at least of my audio/video and graphics work...

So I never had many problems because I have things stored on 2 or 3 backup places.

I feel your pain though because before I was lazy and lost months of collected graphics and audio work... That truly sucked. I hope you are able to recover your data.

Steven

[Andy Price]

Perhaps before you do anything else you should make an image your old drive. Since your new drive is 500 GB you should have plenty of room for the image plus any files you recover. If you mess things up you can re-image the old drive and try again. In the Windows world I would use Norton Ghost for this, in Linux I expect there is a simple command in the console that does the same thing - dd something?
Andy

[nightflier]

A clone image is a great idea. You could use dd to make a bit for bit copy.

[M0E-lnx]

A clone image is a great idea. You could use dd to make a bit for bit copy.

I'm not sure I'd have enough space for this, since a bit for bit copy would require 250GB of my new drive, and then any other restore attempts will fill the other 250GB, which I figure is not exactly 250GB, but a bit less than that in reality.

[M0E-lnx]

Good news. Using testdisk, I was able to recover the drive to a previous stage and recover my data. Some of it is missing, but the most important stuff is back. Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

[MikeCindi]

I am very happy for you. I know the relief that such a recovery brings and testdisk has helped me many times.

[Andy Price]

That's great news. And now you have a spare 500 GB disk for your backups!
Andy

[M0E-lnx]

Yeah.. Some of that stuff was important.. .I meant to delete the junk and keep the one partition with the imprtant stuff, but well, you all know the story.

Now i'm faced with another dilemma. As you all know, I just added a 500GB drive to this box, and had to reconfigure the hardware (that was fun), which leaves me with another annnoying issue.

Here is the list of the  hard drives in the box now. (output of fdisk -l |grep Disk)

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes

Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes

Disk /dev/sdd: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes

Disk /dev/sdc: 128 MB, 128974848 bytes

The last entry in the list is a usb flash drive (128mb !!! )
Anyway, the problem with this output is that physically, there are (2) 40GB drives in this box, and only one of them is being detected.

I dont know what could cause this problem, but i'm not too worried about it since the undetected drive contains no important data, and as you can see, I do have  plenty of storage, so it remains at most a misterious annoyance in the back of my head, knowing that I have a 40gb drive that is not seen by the box.

Here are some more details about this box.
The board supports (4) sata ports and (1) IDE port
The IDE port is being used for (2) DVD drives (master & slave)
the 250gb drive and the 500gb drive are native sata drives.
The 2 40gb drives are old IDE drives I connected to the sata ports using a IDE to sata adaptor.

What this is means is that pretty much the board is filled up to capacity. and I have tried every possible configuration to get it to detect all drives, and I always end up with the same problem... one undetected drive.

Has anyone seen this before?