Linux Honestly now, is Ubuntu always this dysfunctional?

CUE RANT: Don't read if you don't want to listen to me complain for multiple paragraphs. You have been warned.

I had a hard drive full of music and stuff I had backed up, and so today I went to recover it. Now, I would have just plugged it into my motherboard and copied it straight onto my hard drive but every time I tried booting with it in I got DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER errors no matter what I did in BIOS.

And then I realized I had some Ubuntu live CDs (given to me by a friend - I've never actually used Ubuntu) sitting around, from Feisty Fawn (7.04), which I could use as a proxy OS to copy stuff from my backup drive to my computer. To my dismay, there was no ntfs-3g driver so I had only read-only permissions to my hard drive; no problem, I thought, because I've got this handy-dandy flash drive (Corsair Flash Voyager 32GB, in case you were wondering - nearly brand new, too) sitting here half empty. So I plugged it in and deleted all the other crap I had on it, or so I thought - Ubuntu was showing 16GB free after I "deleted" everything, so I thought I had only a 16GB flash drive. I guess I had forgotten how big it really was, after about... one week of disuse. Hm.

So I copied over 16GB of files, wading my way through GNOME at 640*480 on a live CD (safe graphics mode, regular wouldn't work). The copying took 3 and a half hours even though Ubuntu's counter told me 1 hour and 40 minutes, so I wasted a sizable part of my afternoon sitting there waiting. Anyways, it finally finished and I jumped back into Windows to see that:

a) Ubuntu didn't actually delete my old files, and instead put them into a trash folder hidden from me in Ubuntu but visible in Windows - what a coincidence, I had exactly 16GB of old stuff which of course made my flash drive appear to have 16GB free space.

b) NONE OF MY FILES ACTUALLY COPIED. All caps is very much necessary, as I spent more than three hours waiting on these files only to have them disappear on me. When I left the Ubuntu live environment, I saw that all of them had copied and the directories and files were all there... too bad Ubuntu lied to me. 16GB prime free space and 16GB trash was all that was waiting for me in Windows.

I mean, holy ****. What the **** is this? I wasted my entire afternoon waiting on a broken OS to do absolutely nothing. ****. I am SO glad I skipped Ubuntu when I got into Linux, it would have made me quit Linux forever.

 

Care to explain what I did wrong, rather than sitting there acting like you're absolutely perfect, or am I too below you? It seems I abused the delete key and copy/paste; damn, I'm retarded.

 

I'm waiting for that explaination too.

 

Kinda comes under the category of "if you don't have anything helpful to say then don't say anything at all".

 

Man that sucks. I've never had a good experience with Ubuntu personally.

 

Yes, the .trash can be seen in windows, i cannot remember what the hidden cue in windows is but it is different in linux. For example, I can see all my linux hidden folders in windows and all my windows hidden folders in linux. It depends on how the Host OS parses the file names/attributes.

 

Why did you use a liveCD to copy anyway?

And wouldn't it be better to use a Bart PE CD for a windows based computer?

 

Read the post? The guy had boot errors and the ubuntu disc was what he had at hand.

@OP: I know you said you did stuff in the BIOS, but didn't you miss the hard drive priority setting in the boot tab? It sounds like it was trying to boot from your second drive.

 

He still had to reinstall...

 

Reinstall what? I think i'm missing something here.

 

Linux hides directories and files with a . (period) at the start of the filename; I just wouldn't expect it to create a hidden folder instead of deleting when I press delete. Windows I think uses a Windows-specific flag to hide folders.

Yeah, I made sure it was booting off my primary hard drive; I had three installed: an X-25M with Windows, a Caviar Black 1TB for storage, and the backup drive, and that was the boot order.

 

No, Ubuntu is not usually that dysfunctional.

It seems to me that, aside from your afternoon, you haven't actually lost anything at all. Are you sure the files haven't copied? Because I would bet money that it's simply a matter of Windows not being able to see them. If an OS says the files are there, then they're there, it's much more common for an OS to not register files than it is to make some up when none exist.

 

Another reason i use slackware

 

No, they're most definitely gone. Windows shows 16GB free space, Ubuntu only told me there was ~700MB, and all I did was shut down the computer from the live CD, take out the hard drive, and boot back into Windows.

I used to use Arch on my old computer, but this one is Windows-only for now, until I take a few gigabytes from my Caviar Black and dive back into the world of open source. Slackware is just too hands-on, at least for me.

 

If I understand correctly, you copied to a usb flash drive? Did you execute the 'sync' command before removing the drive? If not, that can cause the files to not 'stick' on the flash drive.

 

Silence is golden?

My first thought was:

"If plugging the hard drive in prevented you from booting, why didn't you just change the hard drive boot order, boot into your normal OS, and save all this hassle of booting from a Live CD?"

then I thought

"I bet he didn't properly eject the USB device in Ubuntu." (or as awrotech says, I bet he didn't run 'sync' before running 'eject')

Ubuntu is not Windows, things work differently. Don't get angry because you don't understand how something works

 

I think he got angry because he lost files due to next to no documentation on a very important subject.

What I mean is that if you do have to issue commands before doing something regular to not lose files, there should definitely be notifications about it everywhere.

Ubuntu is supposed to be newbie friendly (also comes installed on some netbooks which can be sold to complete computer newbies), but when it comes to some areas, it still has the Unix difficulty in there.

 

i.e. it's an ass unless you specifically tell it not to be? Seriously why can't an operating system (a supposedly good operating system) do such a simple thing on its own?

 

1. Boot order was fine, I made sure of it when I first plugged in the drive.

2. Dragunov is right here - why would a noob-friendly Linux distro like Ubuntu force me to do stuff like that when it's supposed to be easy to use? Arch is one of the "hard-to-use" distros and I never had to sync and eject flash drives to make data "stick" to them. My old Knoppix and Linspire (lost, before you tell me to use them instead) live CDs also never required this type of thing.

Basically, you're defending Ubuntu by saying I was too stupid to do the right thing, but if every other operating system works properly with writing to and deleting from flash drives without sync and eject then I would think it is reasonable for me to expect the same behavior from Ubuntu.

 

You're confusing 'not working properly' with 'working differently'.

Having said that, I've just copied a few pics onto a usb drive and then yanked it out without unmounting. I don't have a Mac here but a Windows pc will read the files no problem.