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I wondered if it was possible to download ubuntu and create a bootable cd which I can then take to an old system, which isn't booting properly in windows xp and run ubuntu to again access to data on that older machine...

Any help?

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  • Hi all the above was great information, but sadly the machine could not load the live cd, then I came across this...it happened after I'd gone into the setup bios and the live cd tried to boot up after exiting the setup... "This kernel requires an x86 -64 cpu but you only have an i686cpu unable to boot" any suggestion? The old system is running Pair AMD Athlon MP 2800+ on a tyan thunder k7 dual AMD motherboard.... so it's pretty old... No sure where to go from here... Apr 30, 2012 at 3:44
  • Well the saga continues...I've worked out that if you go into bios setup and come straight back out without saving setting the Live cd boots up, this must be a way of shortcutting the original boot sequence...anyhow I can now get all the way down to the try Ubuntu but once you hit this I get a grey screen and then everything dies, the screen goes black and has an amber light suggesting its on but no signal from the computer, it's as if the cd drive has just given up...um what next, I'll try the other drive... Apr 30, 2012 at 4:30
  • Please add these things into your question. Answers are meant for answers; not as an extension of a question :)
    – Rinzwind
    Apr 30, 2012 at 9:05
  • Oh and you probably downloaded the wrong ISO ;)
    – Rinzwind
    Apr 30, 2012 at 9:05

2 Answers 2

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The short answer is "yes."

But if I left it at that, I think I'd be a jerk. You're probably wondering "how." Well, I'm glad you asked. My suggestion would be to boot from the Live CD and then have a USB drive (or external Hard Drive) handy to recover your files on to.

Download and burn a Ubuntu Live CD (c/f http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/try-ubuntu-before-you-install and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromCD).

Basic instructions are: Boot your computer from the CD, mount the USB drive and your old hard disk, and just copy the files!

Check out this post on this message board for how to mount your Hard Disk from the Live CD.

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Yes, and it is one of the intended functions of a live cd.

Just boot up from the live cd and when it is finished loading pick the 'try ubuntu' option. Click the partition that holds those files and let it mount. After that you can save those documents onto a dvd or cd or whatever media you want to put it on.

You may run into a bit of trouble if the disc is NTFS formatted since you need ntfs-3g to mount it:

sudo /bin/bash
mkdir /media/disk
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/disk -o force

where sda1 might be another device. You can find that with ...

fdisk -l

Here is a How to with lots of pictures from boot up to actually getting files onto a flashdrive.

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