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Hello I am in a very embarrassing situation, I was trying to upgrade to ubuntu 10.04 from ubuntu 9.10 yesterday and while updating I forgot to put my laptop on charger and the battery ran out. Since we know that there is no track back process in linux, all I get now is a blank terminal screen at the start up. Even if I login, I still am stuck on that blank screen.

So the only way I see is to, format and reinstall my windows and linux instances. So before I format it, I am trying to save all my data that is in the linux partition. I am using ext2explore to save all my files. I wanted to know if there was any possible way to export a database or a few tables into a file from my windows partition??

I need to back up my database in the linux partition using my windows partition!!

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4 Answers 4

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  • Don't panic. Take a deep breathe.

  • DO NOT use Windows for this recovery process.

An interrupted Linux upgrade is not the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).

You see, when you upgrade your Ubuntu (or other Debian-based distribution), there are couple of phases going on background:

1) apt-get / aptitude downloads all the available packages.

2) apt-get / aptitude unpacks, examines and installs the packages one by one.

If the upgrade process gets interrupted, apt-get / aptitude can continue it from the point they got interrupted.

Due the very modular design of typical Linux distributions one messed up package can cause pain, but a total reinstall is almost always unnecessary.

So, if you are able to boot to console in safe mode, apt-get dist-upgrade should let you finish your upgrade. Other way to do that is to boot up an Ubuntu live-cd (or, in other words, the install disc you used :)), and perform the upgrade from there using the console.

Although if you have your data in separate /home partition, simplest way is to just reinstall the Ubuntu 10.04 from scratch using a 10.04 installation CD. It should also detect your Windows installation and add it to boot menu automatically.

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What about booting the Ubuntu CD to mount and manage the ext2 partition?

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  • umm how would that work?? Wouldn't the live cd have its own instance of ubuntu??
    – user58756
    Oct 31, 2010 at 1:57
  • The live CD should allow you to mount both partitions and then you can copy/move files between the partitions as needed. If you have an external drive or network share, you can copy/move between them too.
    – user48838
    Oct 31, 2010 at 2:40
  • Copying of files isn't a problem. I need to back up my database which is in the linux partition, would that be possible with a live cd?
    – user58756
    Oct 31, 2010 at 2:55
  • Maybe, kinda depends on the database. If it was Mysql, and the server wasn't running, then you could copy the files and then restore them later. If you are running some other DB, you would have to give us specific details.
    – Zoredache
    Oct 31, 2010 at 3:00
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Why back up the data while running Windows? Ubuntu has "live CDs" which means that you can run a regular Linux environment by booting off of a CD. That way you won't have to deal with buggy filesystem drivers in Windows to copy the data off.

As for copying specific tables, you probably can't do that without an operational database server. It's possible to copy the whole database but the location of the files depends on which database server you were running.

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Why not reinstall ubuntu 10.04? I think the install tool would find a previous installation. When the installation is finished an grub configured, your windows will be bootable too.

that´s just an idea

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