i'm in the process of backing data from an installation of FC4 that was running fine for a while, but then i lost my gnome/kde login options from the fedora login screen. i havent been able to fix my problem, so i'm going to try to boot to a livecd (knoppix or ubuntu) and back up my data, then format and reinstall. but i need to know how to mount my hard drive when i have a livecd running. also, do these livecds have a dvd writing utility? if not, do any livecds support dvd writing? my data takes up quite a bit of space, and cd writing is not an option. thanks for any help you can give.

CJ

I believe that you can just mount the different partitions with a "mount /dev/hd[a1,b1,whatever]" apparently knoppix automaticly detects what partitions there are and puts them in /mnt/ where you should be able to mount them from as well.

good luck.

Knoppix automatically mounts any drive partitions it finds. Look in /mnt for the different folders which indicate what partition it is.
Most any Linux has dvd writing and Knoppix sure does.

What were you doing when you lost the kde/gnome options?

so if i had a single sata hdd, it would be in /dev/sda ? i'm not at my computer right now, but last night, i had trouble mounting the drive in that fashion. i'll try again when i get home.

ugh, who knows. i i was updating some stuff, but i wasnt behaving recklessly, so i'm not really sure. i can still login through the failsafe terminal and the blackbox, so i know my data is still there. i can use some graphical tools by starting them with the command line (firefox, thunderbird, mozilla, gaim), but i cant start k3b. i'm assuming that k3b is the command to start it with the console. if i could get that going (or some other dvd burning software), i'd be all set. i gotta check it out when i get home tonight.

CJ

anyone know where it is mounted? i have 2 hard disk icons on my desktop (two hard disks in the machine now), one i can get into, and the other one cant be accessed. it says the filesystem type cannot be determined.

for the one i can get to, there are a bunch of kernel config files. nothing that resembles my data. but i know it's still on the drive, because i can still login to the failsafe terminal and browse around with the console. i'll mess around with the boot options for knoppix, and see if i can turn off automounting, or see where the drive is being mounted.

it's frustrating because the drive is automatically mounted with the failsafe mode, but i can't start k3b. i can start k3b in knoppix, but i cant find my data. help please!

CJ

i'm even more confused. only one hard disk was connected to the system, but two were displayed. i turned off the automounting, and two are still displayed.

if i cant get this working, anyone know how to start k3b from the command line? it doesnt seem to work. everywhere i look tells me to type 'k3b', but it doesnt work. also tried K3b. i'm using a windows box as a backup

CJ

ok, so you tried mounting the hard disk in a shell window, with a "mount [location]"?
and it came up with something that automounted but isn't very useful.
I would work with the command line, to get the hard disk to mount. after that I would worry about backing stuff up.

well, i cant back anything up until i get the drive mounted

here's what is happening. i boot with knoppix, and i have hdg1 and hdg2 on my desktop. only hdg1 is accessible, and has mostly config files, and 'grub' and 'lost+found' directories. i dont have access to lost+found, but i can get to it from the console with su, and it's not what i am looking for. i unmount hdg1 on the desktop (even though i dont think it matters), and with the console, i try 'mount /dev/hdg /mnt/hd ext3' but i get the same results as if i entered 'mount --help'. just a summary of mount commands. i'm fairly certain that my drive is /dev/hdg, because at bootup, there is a message that says something like "enabling dma for hdg [name of my hard disk]". i'm getting the feeling there is something i am missing. probably something really simple, too.

CJ

I find it a little strange that it is mounting hdg, it usually starts at 'a' and goes from there, though I haven't used knoppix in awhile, and it may just do that. I don't know if knoppix goes through the /dev/ directory and only puts in the things that it finds. if it does look in it and see if there are any other hd* and try mounting them to somewhere. you may also find something by running "df" to see what is mounted, maybe the drives really are mounted but are hiding somewhere.

thats all that comes to mind for me.
good luck.