Hey everyone,
I accidentally installed gentoo over the ext3 partition I had fc8 on. The gentoo install failed due to some unrecoverable error. Now, when I select fc8 on grub, it starts loading gentoo and fails to mount partitions. This isnt really a problem for me because i was going to remove fc8 altogether anyway. i just have 2 important documents in fc8 which I need to copy before i remove it. I have a usb drive however i cant mount using the prompt since it says its a read only file system. Though I can access the directories and files just fine. How can I overcome this? If there's no direct way thorugh the limited gentoo prompt, can I do something with a live cd of some linux distribution? If so, which one?

Thank you,

Nikhil

Just about any liveCD should allow you to mount the fc8 partition and copy the files you need.

I really have no idea where to start. Could you suggest some names, if thats not too much trouble? Thanks.

boot your gentoo install disk and mount the partition, if it mounts ok and the data is there you are lucky, if however it has been formatted and the data is gone then you will have to look to some kind of partition recovery tool.

Is /home mounted on the same partition as /? If not, as it should be on its own partition, you can just install something new on your root partition and mount the /home partition.

Knoppix and Slax are my favorite LiveCDs for this sort of thing.

Joel

Thanks for your help everyone. I stumbled across fs-driver for windows as I was reading some documentation. I installed it and copied the files I required from the ext3 partition. I then installed gentoo over fc8 after formatting and everythign is A-okay. Thanks again.

Nikhil