Re: [tlug] Cinnamon has crashed

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Brian Chandler writes:

 > The problem is that while I understand in principle stuff like 
 > partitions, I have no idea where to start sorting it out. (I do need to 
 > get at the files in my Mint home directory, asap.)

Assuming the data is OK, that's easy.  Boot the Ubuntu system, find an
empty directory (or make one), typically under /mnt or /media, and
mount the partition with your home directory on it.  If you don't know
what type of filesystem it had, try -t auto.  For paranoia's sake, you
might want to mount it read-only.

 > Reinstall Mint in place. How? Is it reasonably likely to be ok, without 
 > copying all the files to some backup? How would I access the 
 > unmounted(?) partition to copy all the files anyway?

You can use the dd program to copy partitions as well as files.  But I
think you're much better off just mounting it.