Transfer files from maintenance shell

Question

I am running ubuntu 14.04.

I attempted to boot my computer and I received the following error:

General error mounting filesystems.
A maintenance shell will now be started.
CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and reboot the system

Since the computer won't boot, I need to transfer for files. I can access the files from the command line but I can't teansfer any files.

I tried to mount the usb drive but the 'mount' is not installed.

I then used rsync -avh /dev/sdb /media/usb

error message:

rsync: mknod "/media/usb" failed: Read-only file system (30)

I am not tied to this method. I just need to transfer my files.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Instead of doing things the hard way you can just start a live Linux system from USB or CD/DVD and rescue your data with that. It would also make the diagnosis of the mount error(s) more convenient.

If you really want or need to use the rescue shell,

• look for a writeable file system like /run or /tmp (look at the mount options in the output of mount or the content of /proc/mounts for suitable ones) or
• create a writeable tmpfs mount point yourself (mount -t tmpfs none /tmp).

There you can create directories you can later use as mount points for the file system(s) containing your data and those on your transfer medium. You should use the --read-only flag of mount on the former as to not alter or delete any data accidentally.