hey,
I have both my hard drives formatted for Suse. One of my hard drives has a full install of Suse Linux. I messed up my suse install, but have some valuable files on both hard drives. I downloaded and burned a live version of ubuntu, and booted it up, expecting to use it to copy files from one hard drive to the other, and to wipe the suse drive when I finished. The problem is I can't seem to get hard drive access using ubuntu live. The internet works, the floppy drives work, the cd drives work, the printer works, everything works perfectly except file access.

I am wondering if I have to do something special to mount the hard drives.

I read somewhere that ubuntu may have a restriction on the hard drive format it can read (can it read the suse defult?) If not, what distro should I use for my task?

There are no restrictions on the formats Ubuntu can read, but you'll probably have to manually mount the partitions (especially if you're using Ubuntu, as opposed to Kubuntu). Do you know how to manually mount partitions?

sorry, no I don't

I tried my best guess...

cd /dev
mount hda


... but it gave me an error. Not sure what to do. plz help

This will give you an idea of how to mount and unmount things manually in Ubuntu--though, it uses NTFS as an example:

http://ubuntuguide.org/#mountunmountntfs

This gives a bit more info on mounting and /etc/fstab. I believe SuSE's filesystem is ext3:

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

What you need to do is do this (I used the Ubuntu live CD to access a hard drive that had SuSE 9.3 on it but a corrupted / and /boot partitions. I needed to mount /home.)

sudo mkdir /<directory> (you choose the name)
sudo mount -t reiserfs /dev/<name of drive, such as hda1> /<directory>

For me, /home was on /dev/hda7, and I mounted it to /old, so here's what I did:

sudo mkdir /old
sudo mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda7 /old

And now you can access the hard drive partition.

Using Ubuntu 5.10 Live, I created a user called test and logged in with it. I then wanted to mount partition on harddisk. However, when I entered the command:

sudo mkdir /mnt/windows

It wouldn't create the subdirectory in /mnt, and didn't give an error message either. Is there something in the Live edition that prevents directories from being created in the /mnt directory? Some kind of privilege problem? I thought the sudo would promote test user to whatever priv is necessary.

I was able to create subdirectory in /home/test.

When you try to access user accounts and drives with the Ubuntu Live CD it's not very friendly, (won't let copy files because you don't have user access) however there is another way.

Open a terminal window and type
sudo nautilus

This opens the nautilus explorer/browser so you can easily 'see' and get to the drives you need and you can then right click on the folder/files you want, choose 'properties'>'permissions' and change the permissions to 'read and write'.
Now the OS will let copy the data to a memory stick, CD etc.