Hello again everyone.

I am having serious problems with Mandrake 10.0 on my mom's HP Pavilion 500MHz. I upgraded her from 9.0 to 10.0 and that's when the problems started. Seemed like everytime I restarted, something else quit working. Just a few of the problems that I am having:

-Linux won't see either CD-ROM or the floppy drive. It's as if their not even plugged in.
-eth0 misteriously disappeared so now I have no sort of network/internet communication at all.
-The CUPS server vanished. I can't print or even access the server utility (localhost:631).
-HardDrake feezes when opening so I can't see why the Floppy/CD-ROMS don't work.
-Mandrake Control center freezes when opening so I can't check anything else out.

The problems are more numerous than that but those are the big ones. Yes the CD-ROMs work because I tried booting from one to the Mandrake 10.0 cd and rerunning the upgrade to see if that fixes anything. Nope. Didn't fix anything. Booting in Failsafe does nothing. Normally, booting in failsafe is the only way I can get the control center to open without freezing but now that doesn't even work!

Ok, I'm sure you all are tired of hearing what's wrong so here is my questions:

-My Mom has about 15 or so important documents on her hard drive that need to be backed up. How do I go about this with no network, no CD-R, no floppy and no printer?

-I would also like to back up her Mozilla bookmarks, emails and contacts; where are these files located?

I'm going to format her HD and take her back down to Mandrake 9.0. I have Windows 98 but even with all these problems, I still hate Windows enough to not put it on her computer.


Thank you in advance for any help that anyone can provide!

-Shane

Shane,

I have experienced similiar probs with my IBM ThinkPad x21. I have no idea what is causing this melt down. For me, I narrowed it down to my ethernet.pm script. It went haywire causing harddrake detection to fail. This made my floppy and cdrom go bye bye. Lots of problems.

Do I know how to fix it? Not a clue.

The good news. You can reinstall and NOT FORMAT the /home partition. This will save all of your mom's important data including the mozilla book marks and stuff. The are located in /home/mom's_stuff/.mozilla. They are hidden files.

Do not add a user during install, just set the root password. When you reboot enter kde or gnome as root. At this point add newuser mom exactly as she was before (user_name & id, user_group &
id). It is a long about fix, but you seemed pretty screwed. Good luck dude.

tsw

Thank you very much for the reply! I didn't think of doing it that way. My idea is not any faster though. I have already brought her computer home from her house. I'm going to set her hard drive as slave and hook it up to my PC. I'll boot my Mandrake and then mount her Hard drive, go in and copy her files over. Then format the crap out of it! One reason I want to star over is I didn't like the way I installed Mandrake 9.0 the first time on her PC. I want to try again and do it right this time.

Also, thank you for telling me where the mozilla files are located.

best regards,
-Shane