Saving H-drive with install disk?

[GregM]

The wife's hard drive crashed and she can't find her backup h-drive that I made for her.

Is there a way to repair her 18.04 (64bit) hard drive if I boot from the 18.04 (64bit) install disk?

It's a real mess. The h-drive will boot but it boots to a screen that is just a keyboard which I have never seen it do before.

Help?

[vinnywright]

look on the bottom left of the screen for a button that is labeled "on screen keyboard " click it and it should go away .

VINNY

[jlittle]

The wife's hard drive crashed ...

Could you describe this a bit more fully? Some details about the hardware and the OS would be helpful, too.

If it really was a "hard drive crash", that means a read-write head made contact with a disc, and a data recovery service is likely the only recourse. Does the drive make any noise when powered?

But maybe the OS on the drive crashed?

Assuming the drive still actually works, first I would boot some live media, the "install disk" you mention would be a good choice, and attempt to copy any important data.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Another realistic possibiliy (if it is no "real" hard drive crash) would be to remove the hard drive from your wife's computer, put it into another computer (yours?) with a Kubuntu 18.04 or equally modern Linux and - as jlittle already said - attempt to rescue any (important) data.
Or to put it into an external (USB-) enclosure, at a pinch.

Good luck!

[GregM]

look on the bottom left of the screen for a button that is labeled "on screen keyboard " click it and it should go away .

VINNY

Found a key on the keyboard that has a picture of a keyboard on it and when clicked the keyboard drops out.
That leaves me on a page which says "Select your user and enter a password"
It has already inserted me as the user so I put in my password in and hit return and nothing happens.

Below that it says "The current theme cannot be loaded due to errors below. Please select another theme."
Below that it says "File xxxxx (location). No such file or directory"

So I am now stuck at this page.

[GregM]

Another realistic possibiliy (if it is no "real" hard drive crash) would be to remove the hard drive from your wife's computer, put it into another computer (yours?) with a Kubuntu 18.04 or equally modern Linux and - as jlittle already said - attempt to rescue any (important) data.
Or to put it into an external (USB-) enclosure, at a pinch.

Good luck!

I have another Kubuntu 18.04 H-drive which I can plug in and it shows both hard drives in Dolphin, but it does not allow me to copy from the old hard drive to the new one.
For instance ".mozilla" has a little padlock in the corner. I was able to copy some from the "Documents" directory and also from the "Desktop".
What I would really like to save are both FireFox and Thunderbird.

Seems like it may be trying to boot from both at the same time?

[GregM]

I went ahead and made another clone of my hard drive and had here buy another hard drive so I can do clones.
Sorry for the bother

[GreyGeek]

No bother. The only dumb question is the one not asked.

[GregM]

Ok, as long as I'm bugging...

What would cause a computer (18.04 on a Dell 990 64bit) to take a long time to connect to my network?
It usually does eventually connect, but can take 15-20 minutes.

[Schwarzer Kater]

That is faaaaaar too long!

But you would have to give some more information to get any real help with your network problems…
E.g. connection type: Ethernet or WLAN.
Plus several outputs from terminal commands - I am sure the good people here would gladly tell you which ones, etc.

Could also be wise to open a new thread for this question, and to begin with: at least tell us the output of uname -a and ifconfig there (perhaps you must install the latter one with sudo apt install net-tools).