External (USB) HDD empty after re-install

[aNoob]

I just upgraded (actually a clean install) from Slack 10.2 to 11 and lost everything on the external HDD. Nothing to worry since I made a backup before,but now it will take some time to put back these things.
What I did, was just to shut down the computer (without unmounting the external drive) and start installation right away. Should I have unmounted first the disk, the old data was still remaining on the disk? Because now all I see there is lost+found directory. How does it work? I mean, if I take the disk and go somewhere else with the disk must I unmount it first otherwise I will lose all the data?
Thank you.

[dkeav]

are you sure its mounted cleanly? try an fsck on the filesystem and remount before you get too carried away

check dmesg and /var/log/messages for related errors as well

[aNoob]

Hi!
No,fsck doesn't deliver anything wrong.Everything is fine and dandy on that device,no errors at all. Remounting shows the same directory : lost+found

[crow2icedearth]

good thing you have backups :) . nextime time before you upgrade i would turn off the usb drive , just to protect from losing data. I also have had it happen while upgrading.

[retsaw]

Hi!
No,fsck doesn't deliver anything wrong.Everything is fine and dandy on that device,no errors at all. Remounting shows the same directory : lost+found

Did you force the fsck check with the -f option? fsck won't do a full check on an ext2/3 filesystem unless it is due for a check or shows as being not cleanly unmounted (which, I think, won't happen for ext3 since it is journaled).

You shouldn't normally get a complete loss of data just by forgetting to unmount the drive, in fact if you did a normal shudown the drive should be unmounted anyway. Are you sure you didn't accidentally format it during the install?

[aNoob]

Hi,
No I'm sure I didn't formatted the drive while installing because it was not plugged in. What I did was the following sequence:
-turn off drive
-unplug the drive
-restart,dvd insert and re-install
fsck-in with -f option doesn't show errors. I guess it just happened. It really annoying because you think the data are always there and all you do is mount back the disk.

[Icarus]

Run testdisk on the drive, sounds like the partition table got wasted and I've used testdisk several times to recover various file system types (fat, ext, xfs, ntfs...)

[aNoob]

I lost my patience and formatted the disk (since I already had a backup). All I hope now is that it won't happen again :)

[aNoob]

I come back to this issue because I did a test (couldn't stop myself :D ). So, I decided to do (again) a re-install. I did umount the drive before and power it off. Then restart machine, install (with format partitions) mount again and voila! Old filese were there.

[Icarus]

It's a Christmas miracle!
...or magic...