copy from flash drive--was reinstall but keep home

[dougmack]

Before embarking on this journey to pclos 2011.9, I copied my /home directory to a flash drive.  What I would like to
do now is to copy back the files from the ?Documents directory of the flash drive to the Documents directory of my
new Linux system. I have plugged in the flash drive with the following results:

Dolphin sees /home/doug/Documents  on  "7.5 GiB Removable Media."  df -a shows the 7.5 GB as sdb2 /media/disk-5
Dolphin opens 7.5GB /doug/Documents showing a whole batch of files.
In terminal, I go to /media/disk-5/doug. Doing ls -last shows lots of directories, including /Documents. I then cd /Documents.  Now doing ls -last shows nothing.
Going back to Dolphin, showing all those files that I can't see in terminal, I go to edit and tag them.  Then I select copy.
Next I change the Dolphin window back to /home/doug/Documents (this is now sda5, my new pclos system) and
tell Dolphin to paste.  It comes back, one file at a time, and says "cannot read /media/disk-6/doug/Documents/WOUXUN_KG-UVD...which is one of the file names.  Notice that it is looking for disk-6, not disk-5, but that it has a correct file name.

I am very confused, at this point, and I don't know what's going on, or how to get from point A to point B.
I will be happy to post the output of any terminal command to the forum, if that will help. 

All help appreciated and gratefully acknowledged.  --doug

[Just17]

Try using Dolphin in Split Pane and drag files from the USB in one to the install in the other.

If you get refusal then it is likely a permission problem .......  check the UIDs for the files

[dougmack]

I get the same complaint trying to drag a file across a split Dophin screen.
I can't see the files in the terminal.  I can't list them.  I can't chmod 664 *  I get "can't access `*' : No such file or directory."  In Dolphin, I go to view>additional information>permissions and all the files show -rw------
I actually opened one of the files in Dolphin, and it opened up LibreOffice and showed it on screen, so it's there and
not corrupted.  It has permissions as shown below. 

Further information:  A file that shows permissions as -rs-rs-r-- will copy with Dolphin, and can be opened and read or displayed.  The others will not.  I don't know what they were saved from; I would guess that they are saved from Thunderbird.  Their icon seems to show an envelope, but if I try to open one in Thunderbird, it doesn't. One file is apparently one saved by KSnapshot. It's perms are -rw-rw-r--.  I have copied 10 out of 123 files, each one individually.  What must I do to get the rest?  (Presumably something on the system can read them. At the moment I don't know what.)

I guess if I could find a way to change the permissions, they'd all copy.

What is the best way to pusure this?  --doug

[demilord]

maybe as root in the terminal do a  chown -R /home/<YOURUSERNAME>  and chgrp -R /home/<YOURUSERNAME>
Your root home folder has wrong permissions probably this command changes the ownership recursively of your home folder to how it should be...

[Just17]

I would suggest changing the ownership of the files you wish to copy, to that of your new install user account ......  it is likely that the UID of your new account is different to that of your old account and old files