<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 Mark Stuart Burge wrote: It should just be a case of letting testdisk find the partition and then using it to rebuild the table and voila! you have your files back again. Perhaps someone else out there knows of a better method though. In any case, if you can, to a 'dd' to a spare drive if you have one, so a mistake won't be critical. Good luck</blockquote><div> Wow, that's a HUGE relief. Apparently the files are there, and accessible. I need to learn better backup methods. Could you elaborate on how a 'dd' works? I say the files are "apparently" there, because Ardour is gone, so I can't test the Ardour sessions. I did not purposely remove it; I did remove ttf-musescore-fonts-installer, because it never did install completly, and Synaptic kept trying to complete the install everytime I ran it. I guess it took Ardour with it. (Though Synaptic says the ubuntustudio-audio metapackage is not installed, so far I've only found Ardour missing.) Synaptic asks for the install DVD when I try to install either ubuntustudio-audio or Ardour by itself. Same with aptitude in the terminal. When I originally upgraded to Karmic, I booted into Hardy from my system drive, inserted the Karmic DVD, and ran the upgrade at the prompt...it was reading the DVD/CD drive fine then. Now it can't seem to find it. Any idea how to tell Ubuntu where the optical drive is--or for that matter, why it can't install the audio package from the network? It does install other packages; I just installed disktest not an hour ago. This is a minor annoyance compared to losing all my work. I have tested the previously nonworking drive now--Audacious played a file through JACK into my USB audio interface. I just can't install Ardour and some other packages, or read or write any kind of optical media. I welcome any suggestions. Thanks, Paul </div></div>