installation of driver under root

Question

I am trying to install a graphics driver as Ubuntu wont boot on my new laptop due to graphics card problem I have downloaded laterst driver and put it on a pendrive can someone give me the commands from root to mount a pendrive and run the driver in it

the file is ati-driver-installer-11-12-x86.x86_64.run its a driver on a pendrive for my ati radeon HD6470m that wont let me boot installation of 11.10. I wanted to install it to see if Ubuntu would then boot. Probably best if you give me full instructions do I do it as antony@antony or with a sudo comand etc?

thanks at command sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt and after password request I get a series of numbers and EXT2-fs (sdb): error cant find an ext2 filesystem on dev sdb second line says simular only its says cant find ext4 filesystem. ati driver...comand not found...

now I have mnt$ .thanks

Tried sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt.... Doesnt work...I get FAT-fs (sdb): bogus number of reserved sectors mount: wrong fs type. The file was downloaded from ati onto pen using Ubuntu 10.04 on another machine. Should I format the pen and start again?

Still get :/mnt$

Update Have formatted in Fat but message almost same.

Answer 1

Mounting the pen drive

Usually pen drives are recognized on the scsi-bus, that means they can be found at /dev/sd*.
If you have one physical hard disk (sda) the usb drive tends to be sdb. If you have two physical hard disks (sda, sdb) the usb drive usually is called sdc.
You may try dmesg | grep "removable disk" to make sure.

Once you know the name, use the 'mount'-command to mount the drive (lets assume its sdb):

sudo mount /dev/sdb /mnt

For FAT formatted drives try:

sudo mount -t vfat /dav/sdb /mnt

Now the drive is mounted at /mnt

Installing the driver

First cd to /mnt, then execute the file:

cd /mnt
sudo ./ati-driver-installer-11-12-x86.x86_64.run

Additional Information

sudo is only necessary if you are not root (antony@antony --> sudo; root@antony --> no sudo)
Installing the driver from within the running operating system may fail. In that case you would have to drop to a shell before booting the os or trying a live cd.