i am trying to recover some files on a partition through the ubuntu live cd (they are hidden files and i can't find anything else that would work) and it said i needed root privaleges in order to copy them. is this possible and how do i do it

Greetingz!

One way would be to use a Terminal session. Try "sudo cp /source/path /destination/path", and check out "man cp" and "man sudo" when you get a chance.

what will be the names of the flash drive and the partition and will it copy hidden files?

but how do i navigate to directories with spaces in the title

or copy from directories with spaces in the title

and then how do i copy hidden files to a directory

If you insert the flash drive after Ubuntu desktop is running then it should automatically mount the drive under the unprivileged user and create a icon on the desktop. Double click on the icon to launch nautilus.

Using the command line to copy file from or to a directory with spaces in the name is easy. Just put the part of the directory name with the spaces in quotes as follows:

alright now copy a directory with spaces to a directory with spaces goes like this?

i just inserted the flash drive that has all of the files that i copied which were unprivileged but it looks like it mounted, an icon comes up in places but theres no icon on the desktop and it's inaccessible when i try to access it through places how do i mount it so i can access it through command line

but now how do i copy the contents of a directory to a directory (copy all of whats inside the folder into another directory, not the folder itself)

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down there, baronbeefdip.

1) what will be the names of the flash drive and the partition?
Good question. Try checking the output of "dmesg" and maybe "fdisk -l /dev/[sh]d[a-z] | grep dev".
You could follow stress_junkie's advice. If you plug in a new USB device, just "dmesg|tail -50" to check the last device name that was recognized by the system.

2) Will it copy hidden files?
"Hidden" files, as in those files that have a dot as their first character? Yes.

3) How do I copy files/directories with spaces in their names?
Well, for starters, don't create them. They're a hassle. However, you can do it like so;
Note that the command you put in your previous post will not work. Your quotes are in the wrong spot.

Sounds like your USB stick is using vfat (maybe FAT32) as a filesystem. That filesystem does not have support for UNIX-style permissions/ownership, so everything will "default" to the username+group+umask of the user that mounts the device. To correct that (if your interested), you would have to do something like this;
uid_number == The User ID Number for the user that will "own" all files on that filesystem.
gid_number == Same as above. The "Group ID number" specified is what will "own" the filesystem.
007 == Read the manpage for umask. A 007 umask will give the "owner" and "group" full access to the mounted filesystem, while the last digit (7), will prohibit anyone that's not the "owner" and not a member of that group from accessing the files.

That's great. Pop open a Terminal (xterm, konsole, gnome-console, eterm. Whichever you like) and run the following command;
That will tell you what's mounted where. Your USB thingy might be mounted to a sub-directory of /media. (If there's an Ubuntu die-hard reading, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)

Well, I'm no fan of GUIs. So I tend to disable services that auto-mount devices for me. I would recommend you use the "df" command to see if the USB thingy is mounted, then just browse to that location.
As for there not being an icon on your desktop....well, I can't help you there.

Okay....if you want to copy everything in a directory, but not the directory itself, and you want to copy all the hidden files, too. That's a bit tricky.
This should work;