Need help to recover Jaunty PPC system.

[casbahdk]

username  lost+found

[tiresia]

The Ubuntu Live CD will mount every disks on /media. Therefore after you left-click with your mouse on the icons under Places, you will find any disk/partition on /media.
Just copy any files you need. If you want to copy also hidden files, press in Nautilus (File Browser) ctrl-H

[casbahdk]

I tried the following:

$ sudo tar -cf/media/disk-1/backup.tgz ./
tar: ./.beagle/socket: socket ignored

Just dragging and dropping files gives me warnings about not having the proper permissions to copy some of the folders.

[casbahdk]

Actually, I can't drag and drop any folders without this error message.

[casbahdk]

Interesting. Some of the hidden folders look like they have the wrong permissions. Is it possible to repair an Ubuntu PPC64 system? That may be the only thing that needs to be done.

[tiresia]

If you have permission problems, start nautilus from the terminal with this command

gksu nautilus

[casbahdk]

Hehe, thanks, but there are also a couple of thousand files. How do I correct the permissions for that many files in a home directory, from a live cd?

[tiresia]

You don't need to change permissions right now. You will need it later, when you copy back to the new installed system. To change permissions or better owner you can use the command 'chown'. See how it works with 'man chown'
An example for a file on your Desktop, if you want to make the user 'casbahdk' the owner of the file

sudo chown casbahdk Desktop/name_of_the_file

If you want to change the owner of a folder (directory) instead of a file

sudo chown -R casbahdk Desktop/name_of_the_folder

[casbahdk]

Cheers. I assume that when the owner of a folder is changed, then the files and folders residing inside will also change?

OK, so your assumption is that it is best for me to reformat the drive and install a new system, rather than try to repair the system?

[tiresia]

Cheers. I assume that when the owner of a folder is changed, then the files and folders residing inside will also change?

Yes, but have a look on that command and in general on permissions in Linux (there is more than just a owner...)

OK, so your assumption is that it is best for me to reformat the drive and install a new system, rather than try to repair the system?

It depends, what happened, how much time you have to spend and how many files you need to back up. If you are not so experienced, maybe it's easier to make a new install, and it takes not more than 20 minutes