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I have upgraded my sister-in-law's Toshiba Satellite Pro L450D-12X but it failed. It only showed the wallpaper and Panel and Launcher had disappeared. I thought I use the Boot-repair-disk from Sourceforge but that did not see the hard-drive it only messed up Grub. I'd now like to rescue the files on the laptop and do a clean install.. How do I get them off the laptop in its current Not Working state....

She has got 30 GB of family photos on there... Am a bit lost now...

Update: I took out the HDD and fitted it in a external HDD casing, plugged it in my own Ubuntu laptop and it only showed some root files... Do I need to go into terminal to try to unlock the file system.... I've got the root password for the disk :-)

Martijn van Calcar
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    You should be able to mount the hard drive from a live-usb/disk and transfer the files to another media device. Also the original problem doesn't seem like it would be grub related as the wallpaper and panel were visible so the system did boot-up correctly. and thirdly if grub wasn't broken it may have been possible to access the TTY with ctrl+alt+F1 and transfer the files from the command line. if that doesn't work and the hard drive cannot be detected you may have to remove the hard drive and connect it to another computer and see if you can retrieve the files that way. – Michael Lindman Dec 13 '14 at 17:16
  • @MichaelLindman I swapped an external hdd with the broken one but it only show 255 MB instead of 160 GB and I cannot see her files when connected to my (Ubuntu) computer..... – Martijn van Calcar Dec 13 '14 at 18:37
  • It is possible that either the partition is now corrupted or the disk is in some way physically damaged. Have you checked S.M.A.R.T data to see if the disk is working correctly? – Michael Lindman Dec 13 '14 at 19:03
  • how do you check the s.m.a.r.t. data??? – Martijn van Calcar Dec 13 '14 at 20:21
  • Either install smartmontools and run sudo smartctl --all /dev/sda in the terminal (replace /dev/sda with the drive path) or open gnome-disk-utility (its just called disks in Ubuntu) select the hard drive, click the options button (its the button with the three lines on the top right) and select "SMART Data & Self-Tests". – Michael Lindman Dec 13 '14 at 21:12

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OK! Michael's comment was answer too, actually. And it is really useful... One of ways to do is just remove hard drive from that computer and connect it to other computer- than copy all files to that other computer.

My future reccomendation: Use USB Flash to store your important files;)

Adrians Netlis
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  • Even though my comment does answer the question I digress from the main subject by giving him a solution to the problem before he broke grub which isn't helpful in relation to his current issues but still has some merit as a comment. – Michael Lindman Dec 13 '14 at 17:55
  • P.S. He could just send the laptop to computer service and ask for hard drive file copies in USB and fully reinstalled PC;) And, as you know, Ubuntu is for free:D – Adrians Netlis Dec 13 '14 at 17:59
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Use a live OS USB and boot the OS then extract the files you need. Don't worry your files are most probably as they were.

If its a problem with grub only then you might as well install boot-repair and repair it.

Go here how-to-install-the-boot-repair-tool-in-an-ubuntu-live-disc to know how.

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