Hi,

Thanks for reading.

Up until yesterday I had a working Linux (Ubuntu v9) laptop that I was using to play around with Magento. Sadly though I managed to mess it up big time by running a CHMOD command from the wrong directory. Having googled the error message that I got, it seems that the best course of action is a re-install.
However as I've messed it up, the laptop can no longer get onto the internet and it cant see external drives.

Another google search found me the 'Univeral USB Installer' software which I'll attempt once I've backed-up my USB drive.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to create this USB drive using my other windows laptop, and then use the USB drive to boot my now broken linux laptop. Assuming that it works, I then want to somehow make my linux laptop permanently boot linux - ie not from a USB drive.

If anyone has any thoughts or better suggestions then I'd love to hear from you. Please keep it simple though, because as you may be able to gauge from my CHMOD command mistake, I'm very new to this Linux business.

Thanks again for reading,
Ian

For installing Linux from USB I normally use Unetbootin to put the installer on the USB drive, works well from Windows.

Hi all,

Firstly, thanks TobiSGD for your suggestion which I followed.

I created the USB boot loader and started off just booting into Unbunto, which allowed me to gain access to my external hard-drive, which allowed me to take backups of all my data - a massive relief!
I then used the USB boot loader again, but this time installed onto the hard-drive, which again is working well. However, ideally I dont want to use this USB boot loader everytime and would prefer that my laptop loads Ubuntu without the use of the USB drive. Is there anyway that I can change my setup to cater for this? If its relevant, I only have 1 hard-drive in my laptop and it doesnt have a CD drive.

Thankss again,
Ian

Hi,

After a little more googling, I managed to fix this.

For anyone else following in my newbie footsteps, the part I missed was on screen 7 of 7 on the Unebootin installation. There's a button to bring up 'advanced settings' where you can specify where the boot loader gets copied/installed to. I changed this from the defaulted option, to my internal hard-drive, and now my laptop boots up into Ubuntu without the need to the USB drive. Simple really...

Now to install all my missing software...

Thanks,
Ian