Winetricks deleted most of my hard drive

tameboy · Post by **tameboy** » Wed May 21, 2008 9:54 am

Immediately after running winetricks a month ago, several very important directories disappeared from my hard drive, and despite paying a lot of money to good data recovery company, I have not been able to recover them.

I have searched this forum and elsewhere for evidence of this happening to anyone else with no result.

Is it at all possible that the script deleted my directories by accident when trying to clear up after itself?

Before anyone gets jittery about legal issues, I take full responsibility for any loss of data (I should have done a back up before running the script). However, I thought it would be remiss of me not to mention this, in case it is a bug in the script.

Marcel W. Wysocki · Post by **Marcel W. Wysocki** » Wed May 21, 2008 10:00 am

On Wed, 21 May 2008 09:54:37 -0500
"tameboy" <[email protected]> wrote:

Immediately after running winetricks a month ago, several very important directories disappeared from my hard drive, and despite paying a lot of money to good data recovery company, I have not been able to recover them.

I have searched this forum and elsewhere for evidence of this happening to anyone else with no result.

Is it at all possible that the script deleted my directories by accident when trying to clear up after itself?

Before anyone gets jittery about legal issues, I take full responsibility for any loss of data (I should have done a back up before running the script). However, I thought it would be remiss of me not to mention this, in case it is a bug in the script.

are you sure it was caused by winetricks?

iirc something like that never happened before.
and a lot of people use winetricks

--
Marcel W. Wysocki <[email protected]>
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Chad · Post by **Chad** » Wed May 21, 2008 10:15 am

tameboy wrote:Immediately after running winetricks a month ago, several very important directories disappeared from my hard drive, and despite paying a lot of money to good data recovery company, I have not been able to recover them.

I have searched this forum and elsewhere for evidence of this happening to anyone else with no result.

Is it at all possible that the script deleted my directories by accident when trying to clear up after itself?

Before anyone gets jittery about legal issues, I take full responsibility for any loss of data (I should have done a back up before running the script). However, I thought it would be remiss of me not to mention this, in case it is a bug in the script.

What distribution were you using? I find it unlikely that the winetricks script did it. There was a bug in Hardy early on that may have been responsible...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/188361

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Wed May 21, 2008 10:44 am

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:54 AM, tameboy <[email protected]> wrote:

Immediately after running winetricks a month ago, several very important directories disappeared from my hard drive,

I seriously doubt anything in winetricks did that.

and despite paying a lot of money to good data recovery company, I have not been able to recover them.

BTW with reiserfs ext2 or ext3 and some some work you can undelete if
you catch the delete quickly. At least I have been able to do so.

John

Post by **DanKegel** » Wed May 21, 2008 12:29 pm

tameboy <[email protected]> wrote:

Immediately after running winetricks a month ago, several very
important directories disappeared from my hard drive

As somebody else pointed out, there was a bug in the
newest version of Gnome for a while that could do
this when you emptied the trash.
What operating system and version were you running?
What version of Gnome (if indeed you're using Gnome)?

I've added a new Risks section to the FAQ for this Gnome problem,
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ?action=show# ... f346eebe87
- Dan

tameboy · Post by **tameboy** » Thu May 22, 2008 5:20 am

Hi guys, thanks for your replies.

I agree it seems unlikely that winetricks could do such a thing, its just that whatever happened did so immediately after running the script. I don't remember removing anything from the trash.

I am running Fedora 7 with Gnome version 2.18.3 (soon to be upgraded to Fedora 9).

One thing I wondered (in my general ignorance of such matters) is whether the problem was caused by a link I had set up in my home directory called "c_drive" which is actually a link to where I mount a windows hard drive when I need access to it from linux. I notice looking through the code in winetricks reference to a similarly named link - is there any possibility that this confused the script into deleting parts of my home directory when it was cleaning up after itself?

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Thu May 22, 2008 7:22 am

One thing I wondered (in my general ignorance of such matters) is whether the problem was caused by a link I had set up in my home directory called "c_drive" which is actually a link to where I mount a windows hard drive when I need access to it from linux. I notice looking through the code in winetricks reference to a similarly named link - is there any possibility that this confused the script into deleting parts of my home directory when it was cleaning up after itself?

Is doubtful that it would remove anything other than what was on your
windows drive.

NEVER mount a real windows drive as drive_c. This will not help wine
and it will end up breaking your windows install.

John

felix · Post by **felix** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:48 pm

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 08:21:55AM -0400, John Drescher wrote:

One thing I wondered (in my general ignorance of such matters) is whether the problem was caused by a link I had set up in my home directory called "c_drive" which is actually a link to where I mount a windows hard drive when I need access to it from linux. I notice looking through the code in winetricks reference to a similarly named link - is there any possibility that this confused the script into deleting parts of my home directory when it was cleaning up after itself?

Is doubtful that it would remove anything other than what was on your
windows drive.

NEVER mount a real windows drive as drive_c. This will not help wine
and it will end up breaking your windows install.

John

I guessing that what he meant was that he had the following setup
windows on /home/username/c_drive
which is not the same as
windows on /home/username/.wine/c_drive

--
Darragh

"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool."

Brent Davidson · Post by **Brent Davidson** » Thu May 22, 2008 1:52 pm

I think a very important question is what filesystem were you running
and what version, and where, specifically, were the "very important
folders" that got deleted? Were these folders on the Windows drive and
was it mounted at the time? Were they in your linux home directory?
Did they contain the secret for creating a vehicle that runs on
something other than gas?

-Brent

tameboy wrote:

Hi guys, thanks for your replies.

I agree it seems unlikely that winetricks could do such a thing, its just that whatever happened did so immediately after running the script. I don't remember removing anything from the trash.

I am running Fedora 7 with Gnome version 2.18.3 (soon to be upgraded to Fedora 9).

One thing I wondered (in my general ignorance of such matters) is whether the problem was caused by a link I had set up in my home directory called "c_drive" which is actually a link to where I mount a windows hard drive when I need access to it from linux. I notice looking through the code in winetricks reference to a similarly named link - is there any possibility that this confused the script into deleting parts of my home directory when it was cleaning up after itself?

tameboy · Post by **tameboy** » Fri May 23, 2008 6:49 am

How did you know about my 500bhp anti-gravity engine powered by pigeon sh*t fusion technology? All that work gone to waste.

Well actually it was lots of personal accounts documents - invoices and records of payment that went missing. Important to me, but not anyone else (apart from Inland Revenue).

I didn't come to this forum with any real expectation of recovering the files - I have just reinstalled fedora 9 on the same drive, so it is no doubt a lost cause now. I just wanted to register the concern in case there was a bug or others had similar problems.