I've just spent ages copy over my data to an NTFS partition so that it can be shared between windows and linux, including organising it all, literally all day.
I went to reboot into windows to clean stuff up from that end and got an error on shutting down about not being able to unmount the disk 'mnt/Data' and then when it restarted all of the data was gone, all I could see was the directories that were there previously.
The data must be on the drive still, but not showing in the filesystem.
I thought maybe running windows native tools to check the disk might be an idea and lo & behold:
chkdsk d:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Data.
WARNING! /F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.
Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
Attribute list entry with type code 104 in file B94 is corrupt.
Attribute list for file B94 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Attribute list entry with type code 80 in file B96 is corrupt.
Deleted corrupt attribute list entry
with type code 30 in file B96.
Attribute record (30, "") from file record segment B96
is corrupt.
Attribute record (80, "") from file record segment BCD
is corrupt.
Attribute record (80, "") from file record segment 15C51
is corrupt.
Attribute record (80, "") from file record segment 176F5
is corrupt.
163072 file records processed.
File verification completed.
Phase duration (File record verification): 836.65 milliseconds.
File record segment B95 is an orphan.
File record segment B97 is an orphan.
File record segment BCC is an orphan.
File record segment BCD is an orphan.
59 large file records processed.
Phase duration (Orphan file record recovery): 2.45 milliseconds.
Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode.
Just run chkdsk /f d: and I can see the files in windows again!
But loads of the directories and does were missing so I'm doing it all from scratch again.....
How could this have happened?
How can I prevent it from happening again?
It's worrying to me that files I could see and interact with are suddenly not there after a reboot. I have never experienced anything like that before.
I did have an issue once where I discovered my /home folder had disappeared under GParted. I wrote the procedure how to correct this in both unofficial manual for 15 and 17.