I just got everything up and running, but I had some problems trying to move some files  into a different directory on the same drive. It was telling me that I didn’t have permissions, so I looked around on the internet. I found that I should run the chmod command and did the following.

 

cd /mnt/disk1

chmod 775 *

ls -al

 

This changed the permissions, but not to the subfolders and files, so I was getting the same error. So, I did a search in Google and tried to come up with a solution. I found the following commands and promptly executed them on my disk.

 

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

find . -type f -exec chmod 755 {} \;

 

After I ran those commands, I moved the folder successfully. However, now none of my files show up at all! It looks as though the drives have retained the data as the sizes haven’t changed, but there are simply no files in any of my directories.  I reconnected via telnet and did the following

 

ls –al

 

All of the files were there, but they’re listed green w/ an asterisk after them. So, I called one of my friends and he told me that these were all symbolic links.

 

Is there a way to fix/undo this? Have I actually lost all of my data?

 

Someone smarter than me will chime in, but I am fairly confident you haven't lost anything.

 

IIRC, your first command was close to right, but you were missing a "-R" to make the command recursive so it would hit the subfolders and files.

 

 

Bill

I realize that about the "-R" function now..

 

It looks like I really haven't lost anything. I successfully opened a text file via "vi", so it looks like the data's there. Now I just need to know how to turn those symbolic links back into normal files that are visible from my Vista box.

 

Response level decreased from ultra-panicked to anxious.

Crisis averted thanks to quick response from Tom via email.

 

cd /mnt

find . –exec chmod 766 {} \;

 

That did the trick.

 

It turns out I had accidentally turned the execute bit onto every single file I had. Windows wouldn't read it. Once that was removed, all is well and I can see my files again.