My apologies Larry... my curiosity is very much alive.

I suggested the lsusb command to verify that the LiveCD environment could recognize the USB device.

yancek had already suggested the fdisk -l command (he submitted his post while I was still composing).

I suggested the mount command (with no parameters) to see what how the OP's LiveCD behaved. I wasn't sure if took the liberty of auto-mounting existing Linux partitions as a measure of convenience. I also had a hunch that if the init was damaged as the OP stated he might be experimenting with Linux and thus have multiple installations and/or multiple partitions. Maybe the init was broken by accident while experimenting.

The cat /etc/fstab suggestion was again to see how the OP's LiveCD environment behaved and if any convenience measures were taken there as well.

After doing a partial read of the man pages for su and sudo I see that they behave differently, but provide similar root (super user) access. I only suggested the OP use su if he encountered a problem running sudo. I'll have to go back and re-read the man pages.

Hello:


Did my output helped you diagnose the problem I am having?
Actually as you see, su command wouldn't work for me, I used sudo and it did give me the root privileges.

mansour

Download puppy, burn it to CD, and boot from it.
It has support for ntfs.
http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%...%20Release.htm

Kind regards

Hi:


Actually I need to rescue my pesonal files that I have on the Seagate HD (1 TB). Looks like I managed to back up those files to my External USB Drive last night with the help from all the posters above. But the file is and .ico format and I don't know how to convert them to linux friendly format.


mansour

With the ubuntu desktop version cd you would be able to look at your partitions in the Gui

I know, and I have done that many times, since my ubuntu 10.10 notebook wouldn't boot up on its own. I can see all my partitions by going to Places ==> Home ==> In the left pane of the page. All of them are listed with their sizes in blocks. I can also get their sizes in GB by using df -T or df -h commands in the terminal.

But question remains for me, how would I transfer my /Home folder to my USB External HD so that I can rebuild my system again, and transfer it back to the new system. I can see a file called FreeAgentGoNext.ico in my external hard drive. Except don't know how to convert that to a linux readable format.

All these people posting replies here, don't read my posts carefyully to see what my problem is, and then make suggestions that aren't applicable to my case here.


mansour

If it has an .ico extension, it is just an icon.

http://filext.com/file-extension/ICO

If you want to copy your /home directory and it is sda11, it is mounted at /mnt/sda11 just copy it to sdb1. The commands were explained above but you have only one partition on sdb and that is ntfs so that won't be very useful. You should create a Linux partition on it , format it as ext4 filesystem before copying to it. You can do that with GParted on the Ubuntu CD. You would need to again create a mount point for sdb(?) whatever the partition number is, then mount it before copying.

I believe yancek is right, with the live cd you will not have the necessary drivers for read and write to a ntfs partition.

Mansour,

Did you say you used the FreeAgentGoNext software that runs in Windows to backup your home directory that is on a Linux ext4 partition? I'm a little confused as to how you backed up your data?

My USB External Hard Drive is a 1 TB Seagate which came bundled with a FreeAgentGoNext software. I assume Seagate won't sell you an HD that would be compatible with backing up files in Linux, at least not yet, maybe in a few years they will.
I actually used the commands posted by one of the replies to me here on this Thread (By Yancek who is a senior member of this Forum - few post before yours).


mansour

It sounds like you don't have a copy or backup (tar ball) on your external USB hard drive if all you have is just a *.ico file. I suspect the ico file is only a few kilobytes.

The other possibility is that yancek is right and you don't have the right drivers/settings/etc. to read and write to NTFS partitions using the Live CD.

If you have an Ubuntu desktop machine, why not just use the Live CD on the laptop to connect to the desktop and copy it across in the GUI file manager.

My point in my last post is that it would not seem to be a good idea to copy your Linux /home partition which is in a Linux filesystem (ext4??) onto a drive which has only one partition and is formatted with a windows ntfs filesystem. It would seem logical to me to create a small partition on your FreeAgent drive to backup your /home partition which only contains 272MB. Once you get Ubuntu on your main drive fixed, you can delete the partition on the FreeAgent drive and use it for whatever.

Maybe I'm not understanding what you want to do? My understanding is that you wanted to temporarily copy your Ubuntu /home partition which you indicate is on sda11 to the External drive for temporary backup as you have files you want to keep there. Is that what you are trying to do?

If you read the link in my previous post, you will understand that a file with an .ico extension is just a windows format for icons, probably an image of a hard drive in your specific case.

How would I do that?
Using live CD on the laptop, how would I connect to the linux desktop and copy across in the file manager?
Would you please walk me through the steps? I don't think is possible.
But I am willing to learn how.

Yes, you understand well, that's what I am trying to do.
But how would I make small partition on my USB External HD just for the /Home folder which I need to back up, without screwing the rest of my personal files that I have on it?

Because , I tell you I am not afraid of rebuilding my system all over again, as long as I can save my school work and what not from the laptop on the /Home folder.


mansour

As said before, try puppy.
How did you backup the files, and more important, where did you backup the files to, eq to which folder.
FreeAgentGoNext.ico is a part of the backup program you used in windows.
It's not the backup you made.
You can use gparted to shrink the partition, and create a new linux partition.
However, there is always a chance things go badly wrong, so you should backup your data on the usb before proceeding.
If you can backup /home, and reinstall, I would suggest to create separate partition for /home, so you can reuse it in case you need to reinstall again in the future.

Kind regards