I broke my AAO and backup drive at same time!

Please help

a couple of nights ago I updated Mint XFCE with the latest updates (not to the latest version, I was running the previous 10?). I then set up my external drive to back up all my photos etc.

By the morning the AAO and drive were dead. The external drive gets power surge error (on my windows laptop) and the AAO goes to an odd xfce login page (i never needed to log in before) without the Mint colours etc. When I enter my password correctly the screen goes blank flashes some text and then returns to the login screen. I know I enter the correct pswd as it prompts when I enter it incorrectly.

I once managed to get it to hang on the text that flashes up. Amongst other things I get errors like cp. writing '/use/share/icons.......start-here.png' no space left on device [errno 28] no space left on device.

I used to be able to run live USBs and have installed a few times this way, but now these don't work either. after selecting the pen drive to boot from in BIOS the machine hangs on the SYSLINUK copyright line with a blinking cursor.

I've tried three different ISOs and two installation methods (UNETBOOTIN and Linux live SUB Creator) and have fomatted the pen to FAT32. The Pen boots the windows laptop just fine. I have also flash updated the BIOS.

I'm hoping that I can get a live USB working, mount a second external drive, copy all the data then do a fresh install.

the AAO is ZG5.

Please help as my back up of all my photos and the one machine with all the photos on has died!!

 

Hello again,

I have managed to save all my photos etc from the AAO hard drive, my brother took it apart and saved them all to a new external HD, the drive isn't faulty. I now have a working version of Mint, which my brother installed while the HD was in his machine. I still however want to be able to install other OS' but still cant get any live USB to work. I've tried a couple of different live usb makers and two pen drives and all usb slots but still cant get past the SYSLINUK copyright line. I used to be able to do this just fine, but thinking back I think I used a different USB stick, which is now dead.

Does any one know of particular makes models and sizes of USB drive that should work? (or any other thing that I should try - USB works fine when Mint is booted by the way, so it isn't a fault there).

thanks,

 

I've got several USB sticks that seem to work fine in my ZG5. In no particular order they are:
Micro Center 4GB (Actually, I have 2 of these; both work)
Columbia College 2GB San Disk Cruzer Micro 1GB
PNY Attache 512MB
Ok, so they turned out to be ordered by capacity. That was not my intent.

Just a suggestion - instead of trying to boot Mint from the USB drive, you might try Fedora, creating a bootable live image for Fedora the "crude but effective" way:

Code:

dd if=Fedora-Live-iso-image of=/dev/usb-device bs=4M

There are other distros for which the Live CD iso file doubles as a bootable flash drive image; any one of those would be appropriate for this experiment.