Major help needed - not sure what's wrong

[Seamyst]

Last night everything was working fine. This morning, however, I couldn't open Firefox - it would say that it was loading, and then just disappear. Things started to freeze up, so I did a manual shutdown (held the power button until it turned off), then turned it back on and started to boot into Ubuntu. That's where things went wrong - it would go a little ways through the splash screen, then it would go to a command-line interface and give me error message after error message about the USB hub not working. I hit Enter, and it goes to a command-line login. I'm able to login fine, but it remains on the command-line - no graphics whatsoever.

I know that the hard drive is fine, as I booted twice into Tiger (where I am now). I had made absolutely no changes to anything, not even installing any updates in the past couple of days.

My question to you is: I have two OpenOffice documents on my desktop in Gutsy that I desperately need. How do I go about retrieving those documents from the command line? Email them to myself, put them on a USB thumb drive, put them on my external hard drive... what would be the easiest way? I don't even want to worry about fixing the problem right now - my semester ends in a week and I'll worry about it then. I just really need those two documents. (Yes, I realize I'm a complete idiot for not backing up these documents. I've learned my lesson.)

My computer is a MacBook CD, dual-boot Gutsy and Tiger 10.4.11.

[laney]

Last night everything was working fine. This morning, however, I couldn't open Firefox - it would say that it was loading, and then just disappear. Things started to freeze up, so I did a manual shutdown (held the power button until it turned off), then turned it back on and started to boot into Ubuntu. That's where things went wrong - it would go a little ways through the splash screen, then it would go to a command-line interface and give me error message after error message about the USB hub not working. I hit Enter, and it goes to a command-line login. I'm able to login fine, but it remains on the command-line - no graphics whatsoever.

I know that the hard drive is fine, as I booted twice into Tiger (where I am now). I had made absolutely no changes to anything, not even installing any updates in the past couple of days.

My question to you is: I have two OpenOffice documents on my desktop in Gutsy that I desperately need. How do I go about retrieving those documents from the command line? Email them to myself, put them on a USB thumb drive, put them on my external hard drive... what would be the easiest way? I don't even want to worry about fixing the problem right now - my semester ends in a week and I'll worry about it then. I just really need those two documents.

My computer is a MacBook CD, dual-boot Gutsy and Tiger 10.4.11.

Sorry to hear this. You could try a Live CD to get at your files and then copy them to a USB drive. That should work if the HDD is fine.

[arashiko28]

To retrieve those documents, download and burn knoppix, it's a distro that works on live CD, that way you can access and fix or retrieve what you want. No installation needed nor required.

[laney]

To retrieve those documents, download and burn knoppix, it's a distro that works on live CD, that way you can access and fix or retrieve what you want. No installation needed nor required.

Why Knoppix as opposed to a Ubuntu live cd?

[Seamyst]

Booting into my Ubuntu Feisty LiveCD worked. Thank you guys so much!