this time i managed to screw up something when i went into rescue console – deleted something vital to the system by mistake, i think, and now can’t get into rescue mode or any f9 options.

but what has worked for me is knoppix on a usb stick, and from there you can see your various partitions and copy files. my partitions are too corrupted and won’t show any data, but i used the dd command to copy the drives to another usb stick. i popped that in another computer and it shows no contents, but the usb stick is full. so i used a data recovery program on it (drive rescue) and recovered lots of files.

i’m an absolute newbie to linux and not literate with IT stuff at all and have managed to do all this just following instructions online. just wanted to let you and others know it is possible to fix this problem without losing data.

btw, could not get knoppix to boot on the eee until i entered this at the boot screen: knoppix vga=normal noagp (advice found here).

I love my own EEE PC, but I wanted to really use it immediately. If I had kept the default OS on it I’d be riding a learning curve rollercoaster that, although geeky fun, would’ve dragged my productivity down tremendously. So after a week I installed XP on it, and it’s served quite well ever since.

Also, it’s worth purchasing an SDHC card to use as a data drive. Even though I have a fair amount of free space on the onboard storage when I create or download anything, transfer digital pix off my camera, etc. I store it immediately on the card. There are risks, but if I ever had an emergency and had to reload the default OS I know I won’t be losing my data in the process.

Anyway, a few tips there. Have a great one!

Jim