I "may" have found a source for my problem... ubuntu 14.04 has had several bugs with grub installation.
My system has 3 - 2TB drives ... all bought at the same time and all the SAME Model, SAME Vendor, SAME size and I originally had formatted all with EXT4. I'll call them Drives A, B, C in this description. Drive A was the drive I was always using for my primary 14.04 testing environment and on which I had the previously described files that "appeared" to go missing. Drives B and C were never mounted while using Drive A I had used Clonezilla a couple months ago to clone Drive A (at that time) onto Drives B and C Yesterday while trying to figure out what was going on I physically disconnected Drives B, C and then tried to boot the only connected drive... drive A I also recorded the Serial Number of each HD so I could tell them apart better. Drive A would not boot.... no error it would just display the Bios splash screen, clear and then blinking cursor. Drives B and C would boot up Okay ... and they have basically exactly the same ~/Desktop files, and ~/Documents as the HD I had been using as my primary 14.04 testing environment.... except they didn't have the latest work (re files, virtualbox images etc) that I had been using. I now "think" what was happening to me was when I installed the Final Beta in the past on Drive A... All would work fine until the next time I did a Shutdown/Bootup... at which time my system on Power-Up couldn't find a Grub bootloader on A so it would boot B (or C). To my eyes... all looked identical to the Drive A system except recent files were not present. FSCK and SMART tests of course would pass on the drive that did boot up the system (it would pass on any of the 3 drives because it wasn't an HD problem). Yesterday I used my live-CD .. Grub Disk-Repair and reinstalled Grub on the drive that did not boot... Drive A... then booted off of it. *That Drive A .. had all the missing files.* I think during installation of the Final Beta I hit one of the 14.04 Grub bugs I have found reported on Launchpad which must have wiped out Grub on Drive A. That was probably when I reported the 1st occurrence of "lost files". As part of troubleshooting that and thinking perhaps my original HD was going bad... I had used a Grub Disk-Repair to change either Drive B or Drive C to boot first instead of Drive A (the now "suspect" drive) Restored the files I had recently been working with from a USB drive and just kept going. With the release of 14.04 last Thursday (17)... I now believe either the same one of the reported Grub bugs did the same thing and again I thought I was losing files. In actuality that HD still had my files and I could keep working with them ... UNTIL I did a Shutdown/Bootup again... at which time the whole above sequence would start over. Since the HD's are all Identical and in appearance of general ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Downloads seem like the HD that had been my working drive EXCEPT for the Serial Number was changed.!! Again, I restored Grub to the only HD that wouldn't boot, Rebooted and all my most recently missing files were back. I now think this is what has been happening to me with my system. On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 12:09 PM, brian mullan <bmullan.m...@gmail.com>wrote: > This problem of disappearing files is still occurring. Sometimes they > reappear after some number of reboots and sometimes not. > > I had been running the Ubuntu 14.04 final beta but last week upgraded > everything to the released packages. > > Everything has seemed fine until today. For the past 3 days I had been > working in a VirtualBox Ubuntu 14.04 VM on my Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop pc. > > This morning after rebooting the VirtualBox VM & its associated files were > not on my system (last night they were). > > Again, booted GPARTED off CD and ran file system check on my SDA1... no > errors found. > Booted that drive and ran the DISKS program... ran the extensive version > of the SMART disk tests... Disk is reported OK and no errors. > > I am hoping someone can tell me how I can even troubleshoot something like > this. > > I am cloning the drive to a 2nd HD ... just in case there is any > possibility it is the HD itself... but I don't think so or it would seem to > me that some error would be detected by either SMART tests of FSCK...??? > > I think this may be something with the EXT4 file system & ubuntu itself? > > Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. > > Thanks > brian > > > > On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 6:35 PM, brian mullan <bmullan.m...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> Ok.. today I had VirtualBox disappear from my system. Booted up and 3 >> of the Virtualbox files were missing: >> >> virtualbox >> virtualbox-qt >> virtualbox-dkms >> >> I am absolutely certain I did not delete those myself. Other components >> of virtualbox still showed as installed (guest additions etc). >> >> Brian >> >> >> >> >> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 10:07 PM, brian mullan <bmullan.m...@gmail.com>wrote: >> >>> Ok... this is getting weird. >>> >>> I just sent that last email. >>> >>> The trying to recreate... >>> >>> I copied 1 directory of 30 files from a USB3 drive to my 14.04 HD to my >>> ~/Desktop directory. >>> Confirmed both the directory I copied and the files in it were there. >>> >>> Checked the ~/Desktop/family directory where I had originally put the >>> Word .docx and .odp files and that directory was still "empty". >>> >>> I rebooted. >>> >>> then .. checked to see that the "new" directory of files I had copied to >>> my HD... it was. >>> >>> I checked the ~/Desktop/family folder again... now instead of it being >>> empty... all of the original .docx and .odp files are back... and time >>> stamped yesterday ..??? >>> >>> I again ran fsck and again it reports no errors. >>> >>> I understand I am still using Beta code so ... just delete the Bug >>> 1306237. You can delete the bug I filed as I am not sure I know how to >>> figure out what is going on with my file system. >>> Hopefully whatever is going on goes away/disappears with future updates >>> to 14.04 as I know alot is going on prior the 17th. >>> >>> Thanks >>> >>> Brian >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 9:22 PM, brian mullan <bmullan.m...@gmail.com>wrote: >>> >>>> The .mpg movie was just downloaded to my ~/Downloads directory >>>> >>>> The 15 Word .docx files were copied from a USB drive I use to transfer >>>> from my business Win7 laptop via a USB3 cable to my Ubuntu 14.04 machine. >>>> For those files I created a new directory in my ~/Desktop >>>> and copied the files there. Then edited each of them with >>>> libre-writer, saved each to that same directory as a .ODT file then printed >>>> each file. >>>> >>>> In both cases, I did a normal shutdown of my Ubuntu and the next day >>>> powered the system up and found the files gone. >>>> >>>> The first time with the .mpg file I blew it off as I could always get >>>> the movie again and figured I must have somehow deleted it. >>>> >>>> However, the 2nd time those Word Docs were for my youngest Son's >>>> college admissions documents we need to send to the 8 Universities that >>>> accepted him.... I know I would not have deleted those, especially after >>>> all the edits I'd done. But the next day after the system booted I >>>> couldn't find them. The directory was there but neither the original 15 >>>> .docx files nor 15 modified .ODT files were there ... the directory was >>>> empty. >>>> >>>> That's when I rebooted to a live CD and did the fsck... but that showed >>>> no disk errors or lost data. >>>> >>>> Sorry I can't be more specific or point to anything in particular. >>>> The best I can do is try to recreate it. >>>> >>>> I only filed the bug because if this is "a bug" and other's were seeing >>>> something like this they may be like me and just be thinking they were >>>> imagining things. But if someone else is seeing this then it was a way >>>> to know it was just yourself. >>>> >>>> I am going to do both steps again and then tonite shutdown and boot >>>> tomorrow and and see if anything goes missing. However, I have also been >>>> trying to keep up with the Beta code drops by doing a >>>> apt-get update, apt-get upgrade each day... so unless it happens again >>>> it could be a problem come & gone. >>>> >>>> Brian >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 8:57 PM, Brian Murray <br...@ubuntu.com> wrote: >>>> >>>>> What folder did you put the files in? >>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the >>>>> bug >>>>> report. >>>>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1306237 >>>>> >>>>> Title: >>>>> Ubuntu 14.04 final beta - files disappearing >>>>> >>>>> To manage notifications about this bug go to: >>>>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1306237/+subscriptions >>>>> >>>> >>>> >>> >> > -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1306237 Title: Ubuntu 14.04 final beta - files disappearing To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1306237/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
