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My computer recently wasn't able to boot up properly. I've got ubuntu on a flash drive and am running it on the computer. I have an external hard drive to save files from my internal one but it doesn't show up in the file explorer. How would I be able to mount the hard drive so I can save my files.

Edit: I let my computer update overnight and when I went to boot it up in the morning it put my in an infinite loop of trying to repair the hard drive. All I have access to is the bios menu. I got ubuntu on a flash drive and used that to boot up something thinking it would show up in the files there.

John the Human
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1 Answers1

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Ignoring the booting problems, and if the hard drive still works 100% OK, then you just need to boot the live USB, mount the old hard drive, and copy your files off (to the external drive apparently).

Disks / gnome-disk-utility should let you do that with a few clicks

  • mount (the "play" button) the partitions to copy from & to, and away you go.

    enter image description here

Or in a terminal:

  1. Identify the drives to mount, they'll probably be a /dev/sdXN device, using lsblk or lsblk -o +LABEL,FSTYPE should help identify the right drives.
  2. Have directories to mount them to (mkdir a b)
  3. mount -v /dev/sdm1 a
mount -v /dev/sdn1 b
  4. Copy (cp) the files you want from your old drive to the new one

In case your filesystem or drive is damaged, see these for more info:

and consider making a drive image first (that you can experiment with & break without serious consequences) with gddrescue

Xen2050
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