upgraded to ubuntu 11.10 … not booting up … want to copy some date from home folder?

Question

i have dell inspiron m101z which i was running with ubuntu 11.04 . Tomorrow i upgraded it to ubuntu 11.10 , unfortunately its not booting up lightdm display manager is not loading and boot halts after "checking battery status ..."

i left some my important data in my home folder which i want to copy to my external but as system is not booting up so i login to diff tty and attach my extrnal drive but the drive is not being shown under media folder so i am unable to copy it ... is there any method to recover data in my case !!!

aftr that i want to do a clean install

Answer 1

From a Live USB/CD you should be able to mount your hard drive and recover your data to another USB device.

Answer 2

If you can login with a different tty you could try to manually mount your external hard drive.

1) sudo fdisk -l should list all attached hard drives. Make sure your external is in the list and note it's /dev/sdXY number (where X is a letter and Y is number i.e. sdd1)
2) sudo mount /dev/sdXY /media/external where external is an existing folder under /media. If this does not exist, create it first with sudo /media/external
(i.e. sudo mount /dev/sdd1 /media/external)

Then you should be good to copy from your home across and do a fresh install. The other alternative is to try boot into recovery and choose the remount option, then the netroot shell option and follow above.

Lastly, you could try to do this from a Live CD as joschi has already mentioned.