Hi - I'm pretty new to the command line so I'm not sure how to proceed - I have linux personal 9.1 - after doing an online update and restarted I get a black screen when booting - right about the time kde loads. Nothing will get me out of it. I can put my installation disk in for "rescue" mode - but how can I access the /home files? I know they are still there, because if I pop in a knoppix disk and run from CD, I can see the /home directories, but obviously can't do anything with them.

I want to be able to access the /home directory and move it to another disk drive and reinstall suse - how can i do this from rescue?

joel b

move them with knoppix....

I tried that - but it says I don't have permission to do so.

First of all you should try to boot into text mode. Maybe it is just your X server that isn't configured properly. Simply type '3' when the grub menu appears. This will bring you into runlevel 3.

Both, in KNOPPIX and the rescue mode, the filesystems are mounted read-only. You need to remount the drive in order to make it writeable.

I've tried all kinds of things during the boot process and I just can't seem to do anything - how would i remount the drive from knoppix? I have two hard drives, and I want to copy the /home directory to /hdb, it is about 50 gigs.

Open the so called root-shell in KNOPPIX. Here you are automatically working as root. Create a mountpoint for your corrupted HDD (e.g. mkdir /mnt/rescue) and one for the other drive (e.g. mkdir /mnt/backup)
Now, mount the partition where your home is on to this mountpoint:
mount -t <your-filesystem> /dev/<your-partition> /mnt/rescue -o rw
and the other partition on the other mountpoint.

Now copy the files from /mnt/rescue to /mnt/backup.