Is it possible to recover files on a samba server running opensuse 11.0?
I had been dual-booting into XP and Opensuse 11.2. XP failed (system files corrupted) and ceased to boot. After re-installing XP into its partition and trying to repair Grub so that I wouldn’t have to re-install Opensuse again, I had partition table errors. I wiped the hard drive since I had a backup of my home directory on a DVD. The problem is that once I installed both OSs again and copied the contents of the DVD to the home directory, all the files in my home directory were read-only. Among these was a directory where my documents folder on the samba server is mounted into. The documents on the samba server are no longer there. I thought it was mounting wrong, but when I used ssh to log into the other machine to check, they were in fact gone. Is it possible to recover these? I’ve looked in the .trash* folders on both machines with no luck. A lot of my research was on the samba server. I typically use Knode to check this, but it crashes while its files are having permission problems as well that I haven’t been able to remedy yet.
Thank you,
-tom
Most likely reason for the read only is that your UID number (User ID) changed. You can reset the ownership of the home directory or change the UID for the user in Yast to that of the old. In any case it is easy to fix as root.
If you had samba mounted when you copied the files back I guess it might have done something to the files on the server you are connected to, though not sure how they would be deleted. Not sure how all you did was done, but if you did something like rm -R ~/* it very well could have erased all the files. There is no recovery for the rm command. You told the machine to remove and it did just that. Unlike GUI deletes CL commands like rm in Linux/Unix and del in DOS do not copy stuff to a recovery area. The only hope is that you could use some form of recovery software on the server to try and reconstruct the deleted files. But if the server is active and busy most likely the sectors are already reused. 
Thanks for the reply. It’s what I was afraid of. The most important items were in the public_html directory and in the mysql database, both of which were unaffected. The rest are a loss, but can be reconstructed with time. I’ll be spending the next several days looking at how to avoid repeats of this. This is the first time I’ve lost anything in more than a decade, so in that sense, I’m fortunate.