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user9371654
Asked: 2018-12-05 04:10:52 +0800 CST

Ubuntu recovery mode. How to get backup of my home and download directories

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I am having a disaster. My Ubuntu can not boot. The problem is summarised here

I read about Ubunut recovery mode. I followed these instructions. I selected Drop to root shell promot. I got a shell in the bottom. It has the followign text:

Press Enter for maintenance
(or press Contol-D to continue):
root@mypc-name:~#

There is a cursos blinking. When I type pwd it prints: /root

I need to recover my data to an external hard disk. Please help me in a step by step. I use Ubuntu in GUI. I use the terminal but I have no experience in mounting and working with hard disks and moving data using the shell.

Please note that I have 0 Bytes available in my hard disk.

boot mount backup recovery-mode 18.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Thanks to those tried to help. I solved the issue by following the same steps in the question to use recovery mode. Then I choose Clean (instead of Drop to root shell prompt). This provided few hundreds MB which allowed me to boot.

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  2. I can't make comments, but I want to help anyway.

    You should try booting a live ubuntu disc/USB and select "Try without installing".. You'll get a fully working environment and automounting for your HDD and external drives. While at it you can delete at least a couple files to make some room and you'll be able to boot again

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