Help SD Expansion Slot Ate My Home Directory

Well I've got my self into quite a predicament. I inserted an 8 gig SDHC card in the expansion slot and it seemed to be working fine. Then I noticed that files would show up in the file explorer and not in the terminal or in any "open file" windows. So I looked into it and all my old files were still internal, where as all my new files were on the SD. Then I noticed a nifty little feature in the explorer to "move files" between the home directory and the expansion. So I moved all of the files from the system drive to the expansion drive. After a reboot I get a blank screen with just the mouse... no menus work any more ... I can only tab over to a command line (alt-ctrl-F1). Also all automounting features seem to be disabled. I don't have any other reader that can read SDHC, my digital camera even sees it as 3.4Gig.

If anyone knows how I may access all my home directory files of the media card and simply copy them back I would greatly appreciate that.

 

It's good that you can get to a command prompt. Something like this should copy all the dot files over from the SD to your home directory ...

Code:

cp -r /media/disk/.[a-zA-Z0-9]* /home/user

If after that you can boot back into the system, you can go and remove those dot files/directories from your SD drive. Just avoid removing any of the dot files with "aufs" in their name. Those appear to be created when you boot and probably shouldn't be removed while the system is running.

As to how file permissions will be after all this, I have no idea, as more than likely your SD drive is FAT32 and will not properly maintain Linux file permissions.

Cheers.

 

if you use "cp -a" insteaf of "cp -r", you will preserve permissions when you do a copy action.

in your case it shouldn't be a problem though, provided you don't use sudo! if you copy from a fat partition back to an ext2 using a normal user, the files will be owned by the user you used to do the copy process. ie more or less correct permissions

 

The problem, as I see it, is not what to do to have cp keep the permissions, it's the fact that files copied to FAT32 drives won't keep the permissions or some other file attributes. Of course, if the owner is the same, this shouldn't be a problem. But it could be a problem if there is some file within the dot files that had an ownership by someone other than user. Whether there is such a beast, I can't say for sure. Depends on whether root was used in the past to write anything to any of those dot directories.

Cheers.

 

Well that would be nice, but I was unable to even mount the SD card. I couldn't get mount to recognize anything. I even lost the pretty bash cwd (e.g. /home/user) to the less prefered -bash-#.#. It looked like not much was working at all.

I downloaded a Mepis 7 distro and used an external drive to load the OS in memory and it was able to mount the card. So no I've got my files copied to a USB stick.

Sadly before I did this I tried installing a different distro so now I don't have Acer's customized distro. So I'm trying out different distros now, trying to find one to get the wireless and network working. I've seen a lot of Ubuntu related posts, so since that may have plenty of documentation I might go with that.

Unless some one has an image of the original AA1 file system?

 

I found this site http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acer_Aspire_One to help me with what I need to configure the OS best. Like using a non-journaling filesystem, and no swap, and a ro filesystem (would be ideal): to preserve the internal SSD. I have 1.5Gigs of RAM so that should be fine. The site has details on drivers.

Hopefully I can find a distro that "works out of the box".

[EDIT] Oh me oh my.... I found a recovery disk. Sweet [/EDIT]

 

Well Ubuntu worked great with everything... except the wireless took some configuring. As a matter of fact I had to reconfigure my wireless everytime I downloaded an update. This liast time I must have tried a method that didn't work. So now I'm back to Linpus... Acer's stuff just works.