Is it possible to recover data from broken Linux Mint/Kubuntu SSD?

So I got back from my Mom’s this past weekend and had to bring home the ASUS desktop I had set up for her last year with Linux Mint dual booting Kubuntu.

As previously noted, the upgrade in LM to 22 from 21.4 failed when I attempted it remotely, so we had been using Kubuntu which also had an upgrade ready.

I spent so much time trying to get the thing to boot after Kubuntu upgrade to 24 and think the front USB ports must be going out as I could rarely get the Ventoy flash drive to boot until I moved it to the rear ports.

Finally fired up her old laptop, Ascer Aspire (dual core i5 M from 2013) and installed Linux Mint 24 on it and the constant shut down from overheating while running W10 went away. But I had also installed my Beelink mini pc in her living room with the Smart TV as the monitor and it also works for me to remote into.

Now that I have the ASUS back home, I have been trying to get into the LM folders in order to check if there was anything important there from her time using it. But have been unsucessful in the numerous methods tried.

I can get into Kubuntu if I use the older kernel. But even from a live session, I kept getting the message “this disk is full” and each time I rebooted into a live session the amount of remaining space got smaller until it finally said zero space. I finally went into gparted and saw it was not that full. But I went ahead and reduced the size of LM (partition 3) and enlarged Kubuntu (part 4) so that it had an extra 80 gb of space.

Each attempt to use a live session continued to say “low disk space” and I could not even get terminal to open. Needless to say, I am about ready to give up and just lay a new OS on the SSD in there, but would have liked to use smartmontools to test the disk first as I cannot imagine what else could be causing these extreme issues.

In a couple of live sessions, I got the “failed to start systemd journal.service” message and in Pop OS live, upon restsarting, it could never seem to quit trying to start that service after failure. I ended up powering down to get out of it.

Back into gparted to see what it says about drive space and there is still 70 gb free on the LM partition and 42 gb free on Kubuntu (remember it was not full to begin with and I gave an extra 80, so something is happening to use up disk space). So I am at a loss as to what is generating that low disk message and causing system freeze.

Any suggestions on gaining access to that LM drive where I can just check the home folders would be great. Otherwise, I will need to wipe the drive, reinstall Linux and see if I can test the drive from there.

Thanks so much,
Sheila

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Hi Sheila,
That is easy.
Boot any distro you can find that has a live iso… preferably from a plain usb drive rather than Ventoy
Then use lsblk to find that home partition
and mount it to the live system.
Then you should be able to look and see if you want to recover anything.
To recover stuff, copy it to a formatted usb drive ( ext4 preferably)… dont rely on that SSD… it may be dodgy.

Sorry to hear you are having disk troubles

Regards
Neville

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Hi, @nevj

I tried to do that and was sucessful the first few times I actually got into terminal. But the low disk space freezes the live session so that nothing responds after a bit.

The issue is not mounting the partition (when I do it first thing). It is for some reason, my user folders are available from the live session on that partition but my mom’s are locked. I was going to try the cp command in terminal to copy her home folders to my user folders, but I can not get it done without access to command line.

I dug around and found a different SSD to try as well as different cables to connect to motherboard and will see if that makes a difference in using the live session; if so, we know it is the SSD that is the issue.

Also, since the files I need to check are on the LM partition, I tried to install Manjaro on the Kubuntu partition (without formatting first in gparted) and it got halfway through and closed out of the installer without any error message. The system had frozen at that point. I will now try to use gparted to format that partition and install Linux again and see if it is successful.

I will test these this morning and report back. I also have one of those external drive cases that I can put that problem disk into and check from there.

Sheila

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So I was able to format the Kubuntu partition in gparted and successfully installed Manjaro onto it. I created the mount point: mnt/asuslm and mounted the LM partition and was able to cd to mnt/asuslm/home but once I try to cd to my mom’s home folders cd mnt/asuslm/home/drussell I get permission denied. Mine mounts and I have access without issue.

Why would hers be locked and not mine?

Thanks,
Sheila

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Hi Sheila,
Sorry, I only partly understood.
Two thoughts

  • it may be a permission issue… have you tried as root?
  • you need to run smartctl on that SSD… you can run it from a live usb

What exactly do you mean by locked? … If it says permission denied … what are the file ownership and permissions on your mothers directory? They may have been
mysteriously changed … if so you should become root and change them back to something sensible… like your mother is the owner and permissions are rwx r-x r-x

Could you perhaps use dd to copy your mothers home folder to somewhere else?
or maybe copy the whole of /home

Regards
Neville

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@nevj, I am operating now within the new Manjaro installation and have had no freeze ups as I did in live sessions where I could no longer access terminal to do anything after a few minutes. Are you saying I should still use a live session to do this?

I thought dd only copied files, not folders. If I remember correctly, I could not just dd /home/drussell, but had to do something to the source & target to accomplish that. So “cp” will copy the folder with permissions intact? I was thinking I could just use copy to get those folders to an external drive and check for anything important before deleting that partition (& formatting in gparted) to use for backups, etc.

I will have to see how to change permissions from here. She was not a sudoer, only I was on the LM partition. I always performed system maintenance, etc. from my user or just sudo’d my user in terminal on her profile.

Sheila

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No, Manjaro is fine

You are right. It copies files or partitions
So if /home were a partition you could copy it.
I was just thinking of getting things off that problematic disk… but it looks now as if it is just a permissions issue not a dud disk.

Look into those permissions and ownership… on the folder with your mothers login name inside /home.

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So I tried to cp -r the LM mounted drive home folders to the manjaro home directory and after about 5 min, I came back and screen was dark. Mouse woke it up but then did nothing else. Could not get login field to appear, just the picture of the login screen. I had noticed file manager & system settings froze after a min of being open/used, so even though I formatted the partition and installed Manjaro, there is obviously still an issue and it must be the disk. Keyboard would not respond either at this point. After two reboots into Manjaro with same issue, I guess I will now need to either run live session without this disk connected, use another ssd to install Linux and then see if I can retrieve the files while it is attached as an external drive.

Will update later once I get the new install up and running on new SSD. So far, I am not hopeful. :slightly_frowning_face:

Sheila

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That external drive case sounds like a good option.

A week or so ago I spent several hours working on my mom’s laptop too. She had Windows 10 running on a decent older laptop, but with a spinning disk. I duplicated that onto a SATA SSD and swapped them. I was a little disappointed in the speed gain, but maybe that was due to me being used to a much faster laptop. She may notice a difference even if I didn’t.

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Maybe a sata cable… If the new disk plays up it has to be cable or controller.

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I was beginning to think the motherboard is failing. I used another SSD (my first Kubuntu install) and it actually booted. It updated, but could not upgrade from 22.04 to 24.04. Bought a new flash drive and put my ISOs on it (not from the old Ventoy drive). Booted and went to gparted…“invalid magic number” WHAT? Okay, so try a different live session.

Tried Vanilla OS2. Hung at the preload and when I hit alt ctrl del, it loaded. Then completed the installer fields & it gave the error message could not install. Tried Pop OS. Got most of the way through installer, and it froze. Would not even take a soft boot.

Put the other SSD back in (the one I thought was corrupted/failing) and after two attempts at booting into BIOS, it would only get to grub command prompt.

So I swapped out the SSD (back to my 1st Kubuntu SSD) and the cables (both) and booted in Debian 12 live. Went through install. COMPLETED!!! Rebooted and logged into Debian.

So cables? I don’t know. But now I will try to attach the SSD in the external box and see about getting the files.

Sheila

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