My linux 13 won't boot up after powering down in hibernate mode.
I've tried taking the battery out and holding the power button down for a minute on this Toshiba laptop.
I have a linux 14 operating system downloaded on a thumb drive and can boot up with that, but I have valuable files on the hard drive that I need to get to.
Does anyone have any ideas of what to try next.
Thank you all in advance for any suggestions.

Linux 13? Do you mean Ubuntu?

Has it successfully returned for hibernation before? This may seem like a silly question, but it's not. Something that has worked before and then broke is different from something that has never worked before.

And when you say "linux 14," which linix distro do you refer to.

The first thing to do is back up those valuable files to external media or across the network, if you have another computer. You should be able to do that after booting to the thumbdrive and mounting the laptop HDD, unless something has gone wrong with the drive.

Once you mount the HDD to your thumbdrive, you could take a look a the log files in /var/log, particularly the system log and the messages log. They might tell you something. It would be best to use the "less" (less var/log/messages) command to do that, as that will enable you to navigate through them.

Beyond that, I don't have much but some wild guesses, because I never use "sleep" or "hibernate."

First of all, thank you for your replies. I've been out of town for a couple of days w/ no computer.
1) By "linux 13" I meant linux mint 13 operating system otherwise known as "Maya".
By "linux 14" I meant linux mint 14 otherwise known as Nadia.

2) What has worked in the past regarding hibernate is that I've been able to put the laptop into hibernate mode, then come back later and wake it up simply by hitting any key. What was different this time is that I walked away from it in hibernate mode, WITHOUT the power cord plugged in and forgot about it, and didn't get back to it for days and by then the battery had gone dead. It was after that when the computer would not boot up from the hard drive (where the linux mint 13 Maya is loaded).

3) When frankbell suggested I take a look at the log files, I'm assuming the "less var/log/messages" is a shell command that I need to type in when in the terminal emulator. I will try that now but wanted to send this response in case I mess something up doing this. I'm fairly green at all this, as you might be able to tell.

I just tried the "less var/log/messages from the terminal emulator mode and got the return message, "no such filr or directory".

I'll have to do a bit of research what that means.

I tried:
cd var/log/messages
cd /var/logs
cd /var/log
cd /var/logs messages

All resulted in a response of "no such file or directory".
When I do a simple dir command all I get is the "Desktop Download Music Public ... etc folders.

Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian, and I tested my command suggestions in Debian. Unfortunately, I don't have a Mint installation right now to test with, but /var/log is the standard location for log files in Linux.

You might try an ls /var/log and see if the directory exists. If it doesn't, try
locate /var/log.

I'm going to suggest trying what you are trying, then coping the contents of the terminal and pasting them into a post here. It might be good to save them as a text file, then you can extract the bits that seem to matter for inclusion in your posts.

We can help you figure it out.

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The "ls /var/log" command worked to list of what appears to be various logs, one of which was boot.log
I tried to copy that screen by using highlighting the screen then using "ctrl C" then pasting to a word or text document. That didn't work. Then I tried copying the terminal screen by using the "prtsc" function. That didn't work. Then I tried using a terminal command of "copy" or "copy ls/var/log" and neither of those worked.
I really don't know what to do from that point, but tried just typeing in "boot.log" or "cd boot.log" and in both cases got a reply of "command not found" or "no such file or directory found".

I'll try to find how to a little more research but I'm beginning to think that using linux requires far more programming or tech knowledge than I have, and assumes that everyone working with it has that knowledge. I signed up for linux.org and am starting some tutorials, but they are not in sequence either, and I get lost pretty quick when even a tutorial is using language I don't understand.
Do you know where I can get an online class that goes step by step for a linux newbie? But right now I'm stuck in the water not able to get my previous files off my computer. Boy I learned not to store important files on the hard drive, with any OS.

I would be grateful if you would continue to walk me through that process.

I just found http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/100 which is a great listing of terminal commands, described in newbie language, once a person understands what that is.

Cool! I congratulate you on your stick-to-it-tiveness. (I will tell you that the first day I installed Slackware, I mastered the Slackware install--I installed it three times in one afternoon before I was happy with the results! We were all newbies once.)

If you are not using a GUI terminal with an "edit-->copy" item on the menu bar to enable you to copy text from the terminal, you can send or "pipe" a file to a text file like this, using the cat command. You can then manipulate the new file in an editor:

(You could also do this in DOS, but it wasn't with the cat command and it's been so long I forget the details. I used to do it to get directory listings with dir > filename.txt).

One reason LQ members will frequently direct persons to the terminal is that, in Linux, there are many different desktop environments with different utilities (there are almost as many text editors as there are audio players!), but the underlying command line is always the same. You can do months of Linux computing without ever opening a terminal, but, when something goes wrong, knowing a few basic commands is like having a magic troubleshooting wand.

The commands I use most frequently are

• cd (change directory),
• ls (list files, like DOS dir),
• cat,
• cp (copy),
• mv (move or rename--they amount to the same thing in Linux),
• rm (delete or remove--be very careful with this one--there is no going back),
• mkdir (similar to the DOS md for "make directory"), and
• rmdir (remove directory).

You might want to focus on those for starts.

I can also bumble about in the vi editor, though I'm hardly an expert, but a good, more friendly editor that works from the command line is nano; most distros include it, but it may not be on the menu in the GUI. If you remember the DOS editor, it's sort of similar to that, but without all the blue. In the nano menu bar at the bottom of the screen, the ^ symbol means CTRL.

You previously advised:
1) Once you mount the HDD to your thumbdrive, you could take a look a the log files in /var/log, particularly the system log and the messages log.
2) If you are not using a GUI terminal with an "edit-->copy" item on the menu bar to enable you to copy text from the terminal, you can send or "pipe" a file to a text file like this, using the cat command. You can then manipulate the new file in an editor:

As I re-read your instructions, first, I may be missing something here. I'm not sure if I'm actually "mounting the HDD to my thumbdrive". I boot up using the live Linux Mint 14. After doing so, the command prompt in terminal is "mike@mike-Satellite-L305 ~ $"

If I try to get back to as close to the root drive as I can by using cd ~, it leaves me at the same prompt.

Then when I do "ls /var/log" I get syslog, syslog.1, syslog.2.gz, and similar up to syslog.7.gz.
I also see dmsg, dmsg.0, dsmg.1.gz and similar up to dsmg.4.gz.

But I am not able to apparently get the syntax right to copy the terminal screen for you by using the edit --> copy command, nor with the cat /path/to/somefile >filename.txt pipe. Nor with the printscreen function. I can't seem to get my prtscn fuction to work with anything.
When trying to use the cat command, I've tried:
cat /home/mike/Desktop/Documents > terminalscreen.txt I got "no such file or directory"
cat: /home/mike/Desktop/Documents > terminalscreen.txt I got "command not found", Did you mean cat from package 'coreutils (main)" or did you mean "catg from package 'nauty' (multiverse)"
cat /home/mike/Desktop/Documents/ > terminalscreen.txt I got "no such file or directory"

Given I can't seem to figure out how to get you a copy of my terminal screen, can you make it idiot proof and tell me exactly what to type in at the command prompt.

Remember- my primary objective here is to get the the important files that were stored on the hard drive using Linux Mint 13, which was loaded on one partition of my Toshiba laptop (with a crashed versions of windows 7) on the other partition. I don't understand the technical aspects of the partition because I had an opportunity to have someone else set that up and download linux, but he is no longer available. Once I do that, I hope to return to linux ming 13 or possibly linux mint 15 if I just can't get my Original linux Mint 13 working again.

I'll try getting into the messages and system logs, but don't have much more time to work on this today.

Mint booted from thumbdrive should show your HD-stuff in the file manager.
("Computer"-named icon)
In the left hand side there should be a list.

Double-clicking a directory under the "Devices"-section should auto-mount the drive (partition) and open the directory. If your HDD-stuff is not listed, I guess the disk may be damaged.

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Hibernation saves everything that you do to an "image" and powers off the computer. Seemingly it cannot find the hibernation image to start up the computer again..

Have you setup the partitions in a special way?

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When I right click on the device that I believe is my linux mint 13 based hard drive, and attempt to "mount" it, (that sure sounds like a testosterone based term , I get the message:
Error mounting /dev/sda5 at /media/mike/0ef8b867-bc18-4426-a208-54f9606bb018: Command-line `mount -t "ext4" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/sda5" "/media/mike/0ef8b867-bc18-4426-a208-54f9606bb018"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda5,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

I'm going to try the dmesg | tail command in terminal, and continue to try to figure out how to copy the terminal screen to a text document, but I'm only going to have a few hours today to work on this then will be gone for 3 days.

This message does appear to be getting to the root of the problem, i.e. "the device was exited with non-zero exit status", which I sounds like something I'm being punished for.

Once again thanks for your input and patience with this linux newbie.

This: " wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda5,"
lets believe that the mount doesn't understand what it got.
Something on that disk seems to be corrupted.

I'd recommend looking into TRK (Trinity Rescue Kit) now. Maybe something can still be saved.

http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.ph...g=en&locale=en