This morning my wife's Acer Aspire PC with PCLinux 2010 on it stopped booting. At 8am it was fine. At 10am it would not boot up and had a black screen as though it was trying to boot up in the monitor mode. No xscreen or graphic just console text. Well I went to several computer shops and as many of you may no, the average "computer expert" has not clue about Linux. The Geek Squad was kinda useful though. They hooked the laptop hard drive to a machine they had and said the machine couldn't see the hard drive.
So with little hope of retrieving my wife's book she was preparing to take to a publisher (yeah I always told her to backup to internet or flash or something). I went back online to PCLos sight and downloaded another iso (Phoenixxfc). I am hoping that by booting from the liveCD that I can reach, find, copy the files on the hard drive.
Does anyone know where the "desktop" files are located? That's where the 4 odt files are that she needs. Any help is appreciated. I have a loaded Phoenix and am looking around to see if I can find the files. The previous version is still on the hard drive. It just will not boot.
First rule of troubleshooting,
don't panic, and do something foolish. If you got to a login prompt, your system is fully booted, it's just the
X server that hasn't started. You can try logging in as your
normal user, then issue the command
startx. If that was going to work it probably would have already, so expect an error message.
Posting that message will give us clues as to the problem source.
Better yet, log in as
root, then enter the command
pcc. This will give a ncurses version of the
PCC application you use in the
GUI to
configure your OS. Using the
arrow keys,
Tab key,
spacebar and the
Enter key, to navigate, select, and execute your choices, you can
re-configure your systems
display. First choose the correct
monitor, then the correct
graphics card. (
usually the default choice) Choose the
resolution you want. If you are offered a proprietary driver, that's
usually the
best choice, but it could also be that a newer proprietary driver is the cause of the problem in the first place. All you can do is
try. Run the offered
test. If you see vertical colored stripes and a message window you can read, asking if you want to keep this configuration, answer
yes, then leave the pcc application.
Reboot to see if the problem is now solved.
If that doesn't work, come back and
post your results, so we can try something a bit different. If we can't get the system to boot to the
GUI login, then start worrying about
file recovery, and
re-installing. Usually that is
not needed.
