I tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 13.10 yesterday, and my laptop promptly froze and wouldn't respond to anything other than the power button. When I turned it back on, Ubuntu failed to work period. I can get control of the mouse, but it's just a blank screen, nothing to click on, no keyboard commands are working.
Now, I'm not too worried about this -- a reinstall will probably fix that. The issue is that I have a brace of about twenty OpenOffice files that would make my boss very grumpy if I lost. Is there any way to recover them?
I've made a boot disk using a USB drive, but even when I boot from the flash drive, I can't see the files that need rescuing. Is there some way to recover them? Please explain it in simple language for an inexperienced Linux user.