I am very very very very very very very very very very very mad. Mandrake 9.2 erased my home directory while upgrading from 9.1. I tried to boot up knoppix and the home directory was still not there. I am probably going to switch to suse. I want something that works and something that is easy to administer. If anyone knows if I can get those files back thank you.

PS I could not do a backup of my system because I don't have the INTERNET on it and only a floppy drive. It is an old Pentium two IBM laptop. I know that they say that you can lose your files but this is just ridiculous. They should test their product more before they rush it out.

That's strange... I did an upgrade from Mandrake 9.1 to 9.2 and I didn't lose my /home directory. What was your partitions set up like? mine was | / | swap | /home | extra 60 GB of space |

Unfortunately, 9.2 didn't work out for me anyway so I ended up reverting back to Mandrake 9.1.

Installation froze and machine rebooted. I had a swap, home directory, and space for programs.

I found the home directory with the suse live-eval. (After the second try) Mandrake does not even acknowledge it exists. Very strange. Now I'm kind of stuck.

I can't boot into mandrake and have no way backup my files. Should I go out and buy a zip drive or portable usb thumbdrive? Will it auto detect in knoppix? I need an answer please. Thanks.

When you say you can't boot into mandrake, does this mean you have tried using the 9.2 disk 1 as a rescue disk?

I tried that. What I trying to say is that when I boot into it, it gives me a message saying kernel panic no init found.

It is not a question of this anymore. I know that I can do a clean re-install but I need to backup my files and I want to know how to do this.

I need a usb thumb-drive or zip drive that will work with linux.

Thanks.