N900 Fremantle ... "deleted" my files only 27GB Memory left..
 

Hello there,

I am pretty new to this "Talk" or "Forum"..
(this is my first posting) it would be very great if you could help me out.

I got the n900 and fremantle installed, lately I installed the kernel-power, pidgin & midnight commander...

then - all of a sudden - all my textnotes and audiorecordings which were saved on the internal memory were gone (all of my music too - but that doesnt matter).

everything on my microSD memory is still there.

The only thing I "changed" is to update the kernel-power
everytime I mount the n900 as massStorageDevice on my linuxBox,
I umount it.

I dont just plug the cable out.
Now, when I plug it in again and mount as massStorage, its only 27GB Memory. Is this normal? sure it got 32GB internal memory, but I am not so sure if all this is shown by the computer who mounts it.

I tried testdisk to find "deleted" files, but I only found a few.
maybe the other stuff was overwritten (?) with incoming sms or emails.. I dont know..

Can anyone help me (somehow)?

I would really appreciate that !
I havent found any info on my case on this site or any other (using only google).

yours
Simion
(thanks for reading so far)

Re: N900 Fremantle ... "deleted" my files only 27GB Memory left..
 

27 GB free space on the MyDocs partition is normal.

See also: http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_filesystem

Re: N900 Fremantle ... "deleted" my files only 27GB Memory left..
 

Thank you for the quick reply,

but later same day (yesterday) another filemanager (pcmfm or such, integrated into XFCE) displayed 29 GB Free Memory !

and, are my files gone ? first there were more directories displayed in my filemanager (dolphin) the directories included the mobilphones wallpapers an ringtones.. the notes and also files that looked as if they belong to the maps Applications.

all those files and directories are now gone...

do I have to fear the N900 will again "delete" my files (sooner or later)??

I am kind of worried, because I dont know what the "error" was.

the kernel-power installation, en empty battery (data loss in case of shutdown?) or corrupt unmounting from any computer?

also I'am not so sure if "this" is the right subdirectory of the forum,
I didnt select it manually and also I dont know how to chance it so a Software-directory,.. it seems to me this one is wrong because I dont think the mistake is hardware specific.

-> can one of the admins do that for me?


thanks in advance
simion

Re: N900 Fremantle ... "deleted" my files only 27GB Memory left..
 

That probably depends on whether they're actually measuring in GB (1,000,000,000 Bytes) or GiB (1,073,741,824 Bytes). 27GiB is roughly 29GB.

I've no idea on this one - have you checked to make sure they're not just hidden? Some file managers will hide directories starting with ".", and the built-in application-specific directories all start with "." (they're remapped to a locale-specific user-friendly name by the OS).

The Maemo 5 OS section would probably be better. You can get it moved by clicking on the "Report This" link in the first post, then request for it to be moved in the message - that will make sure one of the moderators/admins sees it.

Re: N900 Fremantle ... "deleted" my files only 27GB Memory left..
 

One big question: Did you change the power profiles at all or attempt to overclock with the new kernel? (If not, why did you install it?)

One thing that's a known possibility with under-volting is corruption happening when writing to flash memory. It was first seen back when Titan was playing with voltage curves. While most devices won't have a problem with it, some marginal devices may still see it with the lower voltage settings. So, if you did set it to low voltage, or set the overclock to max, that may be partially to blame.

It could also be that you just have a corrupt block in your flash memory. That happens sometimes. Your best bet for that is to reformat the flash memory and use a tool that does a simple read/write/compare to find/map bad blocks.

If you want to recover files, your best bet is to use one that scans the raw device looking for blocks that used to be part of the file system. R-Fat did that, as does foremost. It looks for disconnected directory entry tables, magic values near the head of a block, etc. It can sometimes find files that were completely lost due to corruption.

Re: N900 Fremantle ... "deleted" my files only 27GB Memory left..
 

hi there,

thanks for all the replies.
I dit not chance voltage or cpu speed, I installed kernel-power because I read somwhere that I need it to use usbMassStorage or usbKeyboards...

Can I use foremost or R-Fat from my linux box when n900 is mounted as massStorage?

simion

Re: N900 Fremantle ... "deleted" my files only 27GB Memory left..
 

I had a similar problem about a month ago - and it happend almost out of the blue after I tried to convert GPS track files. I only later noticed that all MYDocs files where gone.

Symptoms were similar to your's. I could recover some files by the help of foremost, but it took very long so I stopped the recovery and accepted the lost files.

Good luck!

Re: N900 Fremantle ... "deleted" my files only 27GB Memory left..
 

similar to me - but in my case, I couldnt recover most of the files, what a pitty, but I really would like to PREVENT such a thing to happen again.

but.. how?
at least I am not the only one who experienced such a behaviour.

BUT -> now / today I can see the cities directory and the sounds directory,

cities contains data, I guess from the napps program, and my sounds are gone, there were ringtones (I guess) but my callphone still rings!
:)
all the images for desktop backgrounds are gone to, meaning - not displayed on mass storage, but still usable on the phone..

that.. makes me think my files could be alive somewhere :)

ok. will try foremost and the other prog first...

I really really hope that doesnt happen again,
since I cannot trust the memory ability of this great piece of hardware since then..


simion