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N9 Self restored itself - won't view old files and settings?

I'd appreciate any help on this, as I'm truly stumped and don't want to lose my texts and contacts.

While on a long roadtrip, I was taking pictures along the way. I noticed they no longer showed up in the Gallery for some reason and I could not save MMS images there either. Rebooting did nothing.

Eventually my N9 got sluggish and at some point reset itself.
When I started it again, my background, media files, contacts, emails/accounts, were all gone but downloaded applications still present.

Mass Storage mode shows my media still there, so I copied to my hard drive.

Has anyone seen this before?
I'm mostly concerned about contacts which were not saved and some text messages with information I need.

Thank you in advance

Re: N9 Self restored itself - won't view old files and settings?

Well, I know one failure mode that can cause that, it's rare but it's possible as it happened to me once.

See, if for some reason your device cannot mount /dev/mmcblk0p3 as /home on boot, then it will create a new /home for you off your /root partition. An indication to that is if the first boot after it happens takes somewhat longer as usual.

What's the problem with this: All the stuff that was on your /home is now not accessible, instead the device looks like "new", if you had any backgrounds set, or icons grouped into subfolders or anything, that is resetted to the way the device was in beginnig.

Your previous data is not lost, however. It's still on the partition that's just not mounted anywhere any longer

To see if that's the case, go to console and give command "mount | grep mmcblk0p3"

You should see something like this:

Code:

~ $ 

~ $ mount | grep mmcblk0p3

/dev/mmcblk0p3 on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro,barrier=1,stripe=8,data=ordered)

~ $

If you do not see the line above, then the problem is as I described.

Re: N9 Self restored itself - won't view old files and settings?

Quote:

Originally Posted by juiceme (Post 1340302)

Code:

~ $ 

~ $ mount | grep mmcblk0p3

/dev/mmcblk0p3 on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro,barrier=1,stripe=8,data=ordered)

~ $

If you do not see the line above, then the problem is as I described.

Thanks but I see that string exactly as you described, so it cannot be this, despite it describing my issues.

Re: N9 Self restored itself - won't view old files and settings?

I've also tried:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malatesta (Post 1318020)

Thanks. Actually, my users-dirs.dirs seems to be okay, i.e. it just looks as it should. Maybe somehow the permissions were changed. Doing a
ls -lsa | grep .dirs

gives me:

-rw--------

for user-dirs.dirs

Got a hunch that this may be wrong... Otherwise, I'm stuck...

But the command presents no output.
(i assume this command is to search for any files ending in ".dirs")

This however works as described and I get matching output:

Quote:

Originally Posted by thedead1440 (Post 1306382)

Discoveryellow,

You don't need to use nano to check the file; that's for editing it...

Do this in terminal and post the output:

Code:

cat /home/user/.config/user-dirs.dirs

Basically you need to ensure your output matches the below and no if not in open mode no devel-su for /home/user/ files:

Code:

~ $ cat /home/user/.config/user-dirs.dirs 

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update

# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're

# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run

# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped

# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an

# absolute path. No other format is supported.

# 

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/MyDocs"

XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/MyDocs/Downloads"

XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/MyDocs"

XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/MyDocs"

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/MyDocs/Documents"

XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/MyDocs/Music"

XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/MyDocs/Pictures"

XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/MyDocs/Movies"

My music and images have totally recovered and are visible, but my contacts and SMS are gone.

Are these gone for good? That's all I really want to recover.

Much thanks in advance.

Re: N9 Self restored itself - won't view old files and settings?

Well, to check if your SMS'es are in the DB, you can give the following command as user:

Code:

tracker-sparql -q "select nie:plainTextContent(?d) where {?d a nmo:SMSMessage}"

That should print out the text of all messages in DB.

Also, you might be able to retrieve the content of the DB offline, if for some reason it is corrupted so that tracker utilities cannot access it.

The DB location is "/home/user/.cache/tracker/" which is a directory owned by "metadata" so you need to be root to copy the content to your computer.

Re: N9 Self restored itself - won't view old files and settings?

No results and nothing in that directory.
If it's gone then, time to try a backup restore.

Thanks for all the feedback!