unable to find my hard drives in ubuntu 14.04 in device

Question

I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in my old pc by erasing Windows 7. When I opened my files in Ubuntu, I didn't find my hard drives under Device. The only one option available was Computer.

Is there anyway that I could get my data and hard drives back?

Answer 1

While I'm not quite sure sure what you exactly mean by "opening your files" and where you were expecting your hard drives to appear, I'll take a stab at it.

My guess is that you haven't lost your data. My guess is that you just don't have the disk mounted.

If indeed you have multiple hard drives, other than the one you're running ubuntu on, Ubuntu doesn't automatically mount them; you need to manually do that.

Here's how

To keep it simple, let's do this via the terminal so go ahead and open that.

then enter the following to list all available disks and their respective partitons on the system.

lsblk

My output looks like this:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0  29.8G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   833M  0 part /boot
└─sda2   8:2    0  25.2G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   0   667M  0 part 
├─sdb2   8:18   0     1K  0 part 
├─sdb5   8:21   0  11.2G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sdb6   8:22   0  18.6G  0 part 
├─sdb7   8:23   0 344.6G  0 part /home
└─sdb8   8:24   0  90.7G  0 part 
sdc      8:32   0 931.5G  0 disk 
└─sdc1   8:33   0 931.5G  0 part 

As noted in the comments, you won't see C: or D: or whatever. Instead you'll see something like sda (for example) and then its respective partitions sda1 and sda2. Sda is an actual disk which is divided into partitions 1 and 2.

The best way to tell what it is is by the size of each disk and its description, product and vendor. I know, for example that my solid state drive is /dev/sda above because it's 30Gigs. I then can guess what each partition does based on its size, mountpoint etc. Worst case scenario I can try mounting each one and seeing what I find.

Now you are ready to mount the partition. So if we wanted to mount /dev/sda1 we would run

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

Then to check out the files, you just navigate to the directory /mnt and browse it like a regular directory (as that's pretty much what it is).

To unmount the partition (like if you wanted to use mnt to check another partition) run the following:

sudo umount /mnt

If you want to mount it each time you run the machine, there are a variety of gui mount managers out there that can help you.