I have just installed/configured my machine to run Ubuntu 13.10, with Windows 8 running in a virtual machine on VirtualBox 4.2.16_Ubuntu r86992.
I was just experimenting with mounting and unmounting an external hard drive which has a FAT32 filesystem.
Everything seemed to work... The drive could be mounted and unmounted in the VM, and I could see on Ubuntu that it was also mounting and unmounting.
However, then I tried to access a folder in Ubuntu, and it appeared empty. So I clicked on another folder, to see if it was also empty, and it was. I tried a couple more, and they appeared empty. None of these should have been empty.
Then I tried to connect the drive to a different physical Windows laptop. It appeared that every folder that I had clicked on in Ubuntu was empty!
I'm scared to try access this drive from Ubuntu again, and I don't know what could have caused this to happen. (The drive is FAT32.)
Is there any way to recover my data?
Is there any way to prevent this happening again?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.