Using Mandrake 10.1.
I tried to install a new sound card (SB Live!) yesterday, and got myself into all sorts of trouble. I had been using a much older legacy card (SB AWE 16 bit) with ALSA wish some success, but no midi. So I thought to upgrade. On boot, ALSA didn't recognize the new card, so rather than have it search it's database for legacy cards, I thought to uninstall and then re-install it.
Bah! Don't to it!
Everything was fine for about 5 minutes, then my desktop backgrounds started disappearing. Then most of KDE disappeared. When I rebooted a very plain login screen came up, I was able to log on, and then a very barebones interface of some sort started. Re-installing ALSA at this point failed miserably, with lots of "bad signature" errors. Clearly my personal files were still there (but I haven't explored much yet, to be sure I can write to my floppy or minicruzer this way). I definitely need to secure a small number of files before I try re-installing.

For the first time I really need the floppy (that wasn't being mounted correctly under 10.1, but was under 10.0 just two weeks ago). How can I do this from the command line, please? What I would really like to do is reinstall without overwriting any other partition, like the one where my home account is. Do I have a chance?

Any help is appreciated.

If your still able to boot into the console then the first thing would be back up the files you wanted on floppy. You could also burn them to a cd but if there is not to many a floppy would be easier for now.

In mandrake you should not have to mount the floppy. It uses "supermount"... Just put the floppy in the drive...

cp ~/<file_name> /mnt/floppy

This copies "file_name" from your $HOME folder to the floppy disk.

Before your re-install mandrake try reneming your .kde in your home folder. This may at least allow you to get back into KDE...

mv ~/.kde .kde_bak

KDE should regenerate a new hidden .kde folder... It's worth a try if your going to re-install anyway.

KC

Thanks, Kencaz.
Supermount hasn't been working for me since I installed 10.1. Worked fine in 10.0, though. As it was, I was able to back up the important files to the minicruzer (whew!) and proceed from there. I re-installed 10.1, but kept the existing partitions. When it came back all my files/settings were still there, and I was back up and running in about an hour.
I'll remember your advice about the /home/me/.kde file. Sounds very similar to the experience I had with windows - same recovery, too.

Joe