hey,
I have both my hard drives formatted for Suse. One of my hard drives has a full install of Suse Linux. I messed up my suse install, but have some valuable files on both hard drives. I downloaded and burned a live version of ubuntu, and booted it up, expecting to use it to copy files from one hard drive to the other, and to wipe the suse drive when I finished. The problem is I can't seem to get hard drive access using ubuntu live. The internet works, the floppy drives work, the cd drives work, the printer works, everything works perfectly except file access.

I am wondering if I have to do something special to mount the hard drives.

I read somewhere that ubuntu may have a restriction on the hard drive format it can read (can it read the suse defult?) If not, what distro should I use for my task?

There are no restrictions on the formats Ubuntu can read, but you'll probably have to manually mount the partitions (especially if you're using Ubuntu, as opposed to Kubuntu). Do you know how to manually mount partitions?

sorry, no I don't

I tried my best guess...

cd /dev
mount hda


... but it gave me an error. Not sure what to do. plz help

This will give you an idea of how to mount and unmount things manually in Ubuntu--though, it uses NTFS as an example:

http://ubuntuguide.org/#mountunmountntfs

This gives a bit more info on mounting and /etc/fstab. I believe SuSE's filesystem is ext3:

http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

What you need to do is do this (I used the Ubuntu live CD to access a hard drive that had SuSE 9.3 on it but a corrupted / and /boot partitions. I needed to mount /home.)

sudo mkdir /<directory> (you choose the name)
sudo mount -t reiserfs /dev/<name of drive, such as hda1> /<directory>

For me, /home was on /dev/hda7, and I mounted it to /old, so here's what I did:

sudo mkdir /old
sudo mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda7 /old

And now you can access the hard drive partition.

Using Ubuntu 5.10 Live, I created a user called test and logged in with it. I then wanted to mount partition on harddisk. However, when I entered the command:

sudo mkdir /mnt/windows

It wouldn't create the subdirectory in /mnt, and didn't give an error message either. Is there something in the Live edition that prevents directories from being created in the /mnt directory? Some kind of privilege problem? I thought the sudo would promote test user to whatever priv is necessary.

I was able to create subdirectory in /home/test.

When you try to access user accounts and drives with the Ubuntu Live CD it's not very friendly, (won't let copy files because you don't have user access) however there is another way.

Open a terminal window and type
sudo nautilus

This opens the nautilus explorer/browser so you can easily 'see' and get to the drives you need and you can then right click on the folder/files you want, choose 'properties'>'permissions' and change the permissions to 'read and write'.
Now the OS will let copy the data to a memory stick, CD etc.

after you have access to my home folder and they click on my user account name it show this :

Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop and README.TXT

I don't know what to do with it I try opening it and changing the permissions. Nothing happens?

Accessing the drive will be as easy from your other Suse install as it is from the live CD and a lot faster.

I don't think that going into Nautilus as root will show your the drive though.

In either case, Live Session or from your other install, will require mounting the drive. You do this as root;
or any name you want for the directory. Then;
That should mount the drive in your /mnt/rescue directory.

Now you can access that with Nautilus as root.

Problem with that is that you will have all files transfered owned by root.

You will need to chown the suckers sometime. I suggest that you run, again as root;
where "user" is your user name. This should give your user the ownership of /mnt/rescue and all its contents. This way you can go through them with Nautilus as user, not root, and copy them anywhere you have permission to put files.

When everything is straightened out I would get rid of that /mnt/rescue directory as it is a user owned directory in your system files. Messy. Or you could use the same chown command with "root" in place of each instance of "user". This will return that directory to root ownership and leave it there in case you ever need it again.

You may find it easier to recover your data using a Parted Magic Live CD: http://partedmagic.com/doku.php
I have used Parted Magic to recover data from failing hard drives with good results.
You can also use Parted Magic to create, delete, refomat, and resize partitins easily with a nice and easy to use graphical partition manager.

You could also use the System Rescue CD for this purpose: http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage