Saving Files from a Nonbooting Hard Drive

If restoring the GRUB2 boot loader fails and you still cannot boot from the hard drive, try to use the live DVD to recover your data. Boot and mount the hard drive as shown previously and then attach an external storage device such as a USB thumb drive or an external hard drive. Then copy the files you want to save from the mounted drive to the external drive.

If you cannot mount the drive at all, your options become more limited and possibly more expensive. It is likely that either the hardware has failed or the file system has become badly corrupted. In either case, recovery is either impossible or more difficult and best left to experts if the data is important to you. But, the good news is that you ...

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