need help retriving files from botched OS upgrade
 

HI, I have a Acer Aspire One A110L (ssd harddrive) with Xubuntu installed. I tried to upgrade to neweset release buth something went completely wrong. I will do a fresh install but I need to save some files that was in the homefolder.
When I try to start the botched OS I manage to get into an CLI and from there I still can find the files I wanna save. Problem is I cant find the USB-stick I want to save them on. I have done 'fdisk -l' and the USBstick doesn't show up. read somewhere if I did 'lsmod' it would show if the "usb reading part of the os" was loaded or not and it seems it is not.So I tried to save the files via a live-USB w xubuntu but from that I cant find the original homedir, just a new home.

Any ideas? The files are very important, and I have a backup but it is a bit too old

With the live CD you will have to open a command prompt, get root privledges, and do some commands.

First, decide where you want to mount the drive. I just went through this, and used /media as a place to start.

So, I did a 'cd /media'. Then I did a 'mkdir ce' The ce part is a new folder to mount the drive to. If you do a 'ls' at this point, you should see a directory listed called /media/ce. You can call this new folder anything you like.

Now as root, do a mount command. 'mount -t filesystemtype /dev/sda1 /media/ce' You need to know what file system is on the partition you want to mount. You also need to check the /dev/sda1 ( the second part ). IDE drives are hda's ie hda1 would be the first partition, hda2 the second primary partition. If you get no messages, the command worked. Do an 'ls' in the /media/ce directroy. You should see the file structure of the mounted HD. Now you have full read access to the files.

On the memory stick, try a 'lsusb' command to see if the stick is seen by the system. If yes, you can use the same procedure to mount it to the file system. Now copy away.

Boot into the Live/Recovery CD

When you do fdisk -l, find which one was your original home directory.
then mount it.

mkdir /oldhome

mount /dev/hda6 /oldhome

Your original home directory should now appear under /oldhome.

You will need to put the home directory from fdisk -l instead of /dev/hda6.

mount may need some additional options depending on the filesystem (mount -t filesystemtype).

I actually don't remember what filesystem I had, is there a command for finding out?
When I do fdisk -l it says just /dev/sda system linux

You can try the trail and error method. ext2 and ext3 are very common. You format the partitions when you install usually. If you did nothing exotic, then try each one until it mounts. It will give you an error if you pick the wrong fstype.

Or...

If you are more familiar with a GUI, you might try a live-cd of PCLinuxOS. It will let you boot directly as root and show you the folders and files it find graphically.

OK, thats a logical approach :-), I'll do that. I might have gone the exotic route and used reiser or something, but it's just 4-5 choices anyway. I'll post back tomorrow and prob this can be marked solved then.
Thanx a bunch everyone!

OK, problem solved, thanks to all again. How do I mark this thread solved?

Done, click the 'Tags' icon at the bottom, clicked the type of 'solved you would like'.