Why did my personal files and settings spontaneously disappear from Ubuntu 10.04?

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I'm running Ubuntu 10.04. While I was working, almost all my personal folders were suddenly gone, both from my home folder and my desktop.

When I rebooted the computer, all my personal settings were gone too, like wallpaper, panels etc.

What happened? (I am not a complete newbie, I didn't just suddenly happen to erase my folders by accident.)

edited Mar 23 '11 at 15:31

Lord Torgamus
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asked Mar 23 '11 at 12:22

Toby

You may be right that it could have been disk problems. When I wanted to clone the hd now with the dd command, I got an error. Then I ran Gparted and to me it looked suspicious with 2 partitions overlapping. I have posted another question on how to fix that with picture of how gparted shows my disk: stackoverflow.com/questions/5412152/… – user73134 Mar 23 '11 at 22:05

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Mar 23 '11 at 12:31

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1 Answer

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Check the contents of /home/* as root to see if maybe access rights were revoked from your user account for some reason.

If your /home folder was on its own partition, it might have been unmounted, so check for mounts, e.g by executing "mount" in a shell.

Otherwise, a hard disk issue seems likely to me if you did not delete the contents yourself or ran some suspicious software.

answered Mar 23 '11 at 12:58

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