I have a dual booting box with Windows 7 (which I haven't used for months) on the first partition, Ubuntu 10.4 on the second and a 5 GB scratch partition on the third. I've never had a problem until now. I booted the machine and grub came up as usual, defaulting to my Ubuntu installation; I let it boot but it stopped during the boot, reporting that it could not find the init scripts. I loaded a 10.4 live CD to see if I could find the missing files. The partition was mounted and showed that it contained 100GB but when I looked at it (as root) I could only see the top level directories in root ('/') and they appeared empty. I booted into Windows7 and installed an ext3 driver, this mounted ok but only showed the same thing. I had just recovered about 60GB of data off a broken MacBook hard drive onto the Ubuntu partition and have now wiped the Mac hard drive thinking my data was safe! I either need to repair the installation that I have or recover the data somehow. Can anyone help, please.

Many thanks,

Neil

How did you copy the files from the mac drive?
I suggest using testdisk and photorec.
I guess you did not verify the files were copied before wiping the drive...

I copied the files by manually mounting the drive (via USB interface) with uid=501 (OSX uses uid 501 for root), otherwise I could not read anything that was not 777. This worked fine (took a few attempts to work out how) then I copied all the files from my old documents directory on the OSX drive into another directory on my Ubuntu drive. All worked fine until the machine was restarted a day or two later.

I wiped the old osx drive using bootItNG (a boot cd for disk utilities) secure wipe (multi pass zero-write) thinking it was safe to do so as I had a copy of all my data, I had to re-boot back into Ubuntu after, which failed. I've used bootItNG hundereds of times on all types of file systems before and after, without problems.

Any help is greatly appreciated.