Member Avatar for Karlwakim

My laptop recently got a bsod (bad pool caller) while uninstalling hotspot shield which is a vpn app.
Then, after rebooting, windows will startup normally, then get the same bsod.
After using driver verifier in safe mode (verifier.exe), and rebooting, windows won't boot.
This isn't the issue (so i don't want any help on the bsod or windows). I connected my laptop's hdd to my desktop which has backtrack 5r3 installed.
I booted backtrack, then copied the whole content of my laptop's hdd to my desktop's hdd.
the problem is backtrack does not display any folder that has a dot in the beginning of its name.
(like .minecraft or any folder i had named which a dot at the beginning)
These folders don't show at all. Whether on a flash drive or hdd.
So this is my issue. Thanks for any help.
I tried googling this, but i never found out why these folders do not show.
Any answer will be appreciated :)
I didn't mention specs cause i assume they don't matter.

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Dani AI

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Short summary and practical checks. Echoing and , names that begin with a dot are treated as hidden on Unix-like systems, so a GUI may be hiding them — but that doesn’t tell you whether those directories were actually copied. The most common causes are (a) they exist but the file manager is hiding them, or (b) the copy command used shell globs that did not include dot-names, so they were never copied.

Confirm whether the dot-folders really exist on the mounted laptop disk:

find /mnt/laptop_mount -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -name ".*" -print

If you see those entries, enable your file manager’s “show hidden files” or use a terminal to access them. If they do not appear, proceed to recopy with a method that reliably includes dotfiles and preserves metadata.

Reliable copy workflows (preserve permissions, owners, symlinks and hidden names):

# rsync preserving attributes (good default for whole-directory copy)
rsync -aHAX --numeric-ids /mnt/source/ /mnt/target/

or, if you prefer an archive pipeline:

cd /mnt/source
tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/target && tar xpf -)

Note: shell globs like * do not match dotfiles unless you enable dot matching in bash (shopt -s dotglob) or use a pattern that explicitly starts with a dot.

If the dot-folders were never copied and they contain important data, stop writing to the source disk and consider recovery tools or a professional service. As pointed toward copy tools, using rsync/tar as shown above will avoid the wildcard-globbing pitfall that commonly causes hidden files to be skipped.

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for CimmerianX

In backtrack (or any linux distro), a directory with a . as first character is hidden.

You can list all files, including hidden files, with ls -la

Member Avatar for HereInOz

If you are using Nautilus as a file manager, you can use CTRL-H to show these hidden files. May work with other file managers as well.

Member Avatar for here2serve

cp -a source destination This would have gotten them all you could also use rsync

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