I have a intel machine that I installed redhat 7.3 on. Basically, I have some extremely important data on it that I thought I lost, but turns out I didn't. However, I think because I pulled the hard drive out of the computer (motherboard and everything else lost due to water damage) after boot up I simply get a weird blue screen. Clicking on the screen displays a number of options, but it's not the familiar gnome desktop. I have no interface to get to my files and pull them off. I believe I've seen this type of thing before, but I don't remember what I did to solve the problem.

What I plan on doing is simply upgrading to rh 9.0. However, I don't want to lose info. I don't think I'll have a problem, but again, the information I have on there is important. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

One of Redhat 9's install options is an upgrade, which _should_ work. But if your data's very important, then I would see if I could slave the drive and mount it from another system. For example, install Redhat on another HDD (if one's available) and install your data HDD in the machine and mount it and copy the data over.

Good luck.

This problem you've got into sounds dodgy! Did you ever here of backups? Do you have a command line?

It's a long story as to why I don't have a backup. I know that I can change the run level to three to get to the command line. I just don't seem to get any type of interface to do it.

However, I'm going to attempt to upgrade today and see how that goes. I'm expecting it to be fine, but was just looking for thoughts. Thanks for the help.

I tried to upgrade from a similar senario before, after the upgrade the system was still unable to boot, I had to reinstall the system and recover from backups. If your upgrade doesn't work, you may be able to retain your data, if it is located on a partition eg /dev/hda5 /home you may be able to do a fresh install, partition the disk manually and be sure that this partition is not formated, you will find that your data will still be on that partition.