Hi,

I have a laptop with SuSE 11.2 installed, worked all like a charm.

Then the problems started :
I lost my display (it is dark, you can see very very faint the desktop from time to time)
Clearly a hardware problem.
So, I attached an external screen. Only this shows nothing, cannot get it activated.
Since the laptop automatically boots into our LAN, i just started it, and connected via SSH from an other computer.
No problem i have a shell.

Then I thought to be clever, and activated the pure-ftp demon, so I can download all interesting files to a new computer. I activated it with / as shared directory.

After that, I could not boot the laptop anymore, it did not connect to the network.

After a lot of try-outs I finally managed to get the external screen working (only after GDM is started, i can see the workspace, nothing at boot time).

Then I found out that the network would not start anymore, actually I could not even start yast or a su shell.

After some investigation, I found that pure-ftp had changed the owner of all files in the / partition to ftp (and the group also to ftp)

So, su has no access rights anymore to /etc/shadow, and thus cannot verify my root password anymore.
Now i'm stuck. I can work as normal user on the old machine, but no network, the DVD wont write anymore and usb sticks don't open anymore.
I cannot boot the system in single usermode, since then I have no screen.

Has anybody here the brilliant idea I need to get the files out of this machine, without taking the disc out(would not know how to do that anyway).

Thanks a lot for your help in advance.

Steven

I would just boot it off of a live cd and copy all the files you need off onto a USB stick.

Booting from a LiveCD does sound like a good idea.
However, you will have the problem of getting the screen to show on the external display.

If I'm not mistaken, the CentOS Live CD (at least, there will be others) does start up sshd.
So that might solve that issue.

Finally, you will have to figure out where your files are. dmesg should show your old disk's partitions, cat /proc/partitions should as well.
This should mount them:


mkdir /t
mount /dev/sda1 /t
cd /t


Where /dev/sda1 would be the partition to want the files from and /t is just an empty directory to use as mount point.

Thanks a lot,
I'll try that tomorrow.

Steven

This could be a burnt-out backlight. If you're adventurous, there are guides online about how to replace LCD backlights yourself.

Taking the disk out and putting it in a USB enclosure, or just connecting it directly to another computer, is probably the easiest method. Taking the disk out is probably quite easy so don't be afraid to try it. I've seen laptops where you can remove a single screw then pull out the disk. If you turn the laptop over it might even be marked where the disk is and be obvious which screws you need to take out. If in doubt, Google the make/model and 'remove disk' or 'remove drive' and you probably find the answer.

Thanks a lot for your help,
It worked like a charm, got all my files back.

Thanks again,
Steven

I had a dell laptop at work. Bad BIOS settings darkened the LCD screen and I couldn't see to fix it. I connected the VGA port to an external monitor and used the FN key for the external monitor to fix it. You may simply have a dead battery on the motherboard, causing invalid stored BIOS settings.