Odd /home partition problem.

[Ken-Bergen]

A friend was talking about buying a netbook which he can't afford for the Internet as his Windows Laptop is virus infected.

I sent him a 16GB stick with Mageia on it which he was happy with.

While in Windows which he only uses for his flight simulator now he decided to look at the stick. When Windows offered to format the stick he bailed.

The problem is that although the stick boots normally now all his saved files and settings are gone.
[df]shows the same disk usage in /home as before this but nether he nor root can see any files in /home only the folders.

He will if needed format the /home partition to recover the disk space but any ideas on what happened and how to recover from it would be welcome.

[djennings]

could it be the dirty flag is set on the partition? If so the solution is to mount it in windows again and then gracefully remove it.

[Ken-Bergen]

could it be the dirty flag is set on the partition? If so the solution is to mount it in windows again and then gracefully remove it.

Sorry I didn't specify that the flash drive only has ext4 and swap partitions on it so Windows never mounted it only offered to format it.

[doktor5000]

Well, you need to provide a bit more information. Did you dd some LiveCD image onto that stick, or did you install Mageia onto it?
In the former case, as there is no persistent /home by default, everything will be gone after a reboot, just like with a LiveCD.

In the latter case, this is normal, as Windows doesn't know ext* filesystems, you need something like http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2read/files/Ext2Read%20ver%202.0/ext2explore%202.0%20beta/ for that. But in that case it would probably be better to put a small FAT partition onto the stick for data exchange?
But as Windows only reads the partition table, and hickups on the ext filesystems, behaviour could be the same, but i'm not quite sure, as i didn't try that yet.

[Ken-Bergen]

Well, you need to provide a bit more information. Did you dd some LiveCD image onto that stick, or did you install Mageia onto it?
In the former case, as there is no persistent /home by default, everything will be gone after a reboot, just like with a LiveCD.

Thanks Doktor.
It is an installation that had been working for several months.

Windows corrupting the file system is unlikely but that was the order of events reported to me.
I'm not so much interested in the why as I am on what to do to fix it.
ls and the file-manager both show 3GBs used out of 7GBs for /home but nether a user or root can see any files just the directories.

Off topic but you brought it up.
When you dd some LiveCD image onto a stick it shows as a Hidden HPFS/NTFS partition, I'm not sure how Windows would handle that and I don't have a Windows installation to try with.
Also a small FAT partition sounds like a good idea but last time I tried it I found that Windows doesn't see it unless it's the first partition on the stick. In-fact I could never get Windows to find more than the first partition on a stick.

[doktor5000]

Windows corrupting the file system is unlikely but that was the order of events reported to me.
I'm not so much interested in the why as I am on what to do to fix it.
ls and the file-manager both show 3GBs used out of 7GBs for /home but nether a user or root can see any files just the directories.

Well, what does an fsck on the unmounted filesystem say? Also you should run something like testdisk upon it
and let it search for files, does it see them?