Emergency Kit - save your files from a dead OS

How to Create and Use a Linux Mint Mate USB Flash Drive to Recover your Files​

   Note

If you are in a hurry and don't want to read the whole saga, skip to point #2 and watch the videos. That will give you enough information to do the job.
The method proposed here is really extremely easy. Even someone with little computer experience should be able to deal with it.

   Information

I am now getting suggestions for additional use of Mint Mate on the USB flash drive. I will list those in random order as they come in. Feel free to make suggestions on the thread and I will include them.

• It is a very safe environment to operate on the internet. Malware infections are quasi impossible and should they really happen you can recreate the flash drive very easily.
• Very often it is difficult or impossible to delete files under Windows. With Mint Mate on the flash drive you have an easy tool to accomplish those deletions.

1. Introduction


A total OS crash is not uncommon and then the last resort is very often to reinstall the operating system. The users who made provisions for that case by separating their user data into a data partition, or making frequent images, can easily recover. However, there are many that did not take any precautions and are desperately trying to recover their user data which is sitting on the OS partition that is no more accessible.

The traditional advice is to salvage the data with a live Linux CD from Knoppix, Puppy, DSL or alike. That works fine if you are familiar with any of those programs or take the time to understand them. But they all have one thing in common - they are very Linux and somewhat alien for a Windows user.

One Linux distro which feels comfortable for a Windows user is Mint Mate. There is quasi no learning requirement because things work in a very similar way as they work in Windows. You can judge for yourself by watching the second video.

The emergency kit I propose consists of a persistent Mint Mate OS on a USB flash drive. That means that any setup or modification you make to Mint Mate on the flash drive will be preserved and you don't have to redo it the next time you boot from the flash drive. The setup of such a drive is extremely simple as you will see in the first video.



2. Preparation and Requirements

We will use Mint Mate 14 which is the latest version and can be download from here. The download will take some time because it is 966MB large. And if you want the latest Mint Mate 17, it can be downloaded from here. The characteristics are the same as for Mint Mate 14.

Note: I haven noticed that not all download sites give you the same edition. In fact the downloads from some sites don't work as described. I suggest you use the James Madison Univerity site because that one I know works correctly.

We will also download and save the Universal USB Installer from here. With this program we can create the Mint Mate flash drive very, very easily.

As last component we need an empty flash drive formatted in Fat32 of at least 2GB but bigger is better. I use a 16GB USB2 flash drive which works very well. A USB3 flash drive would be even better. My USB2 flash drive has a data transfer rate of 30MB/sec and an access time of 0.8ms as measured with HD Tune.



3. Installation of Mint Mate on the Flash Drive

I will explain the extremely easy installation process of Mint Mate with the Universal USB Installer in a short video. Depending on the speed of your USB flash drive, that should take between 10 and 20 minutes.






4. Recover files with the Mint Mate flash drive

Here again a short video is the easiest way to explain the recovery procedure. This video was taken with a program installed and running on the flash drive.

The Mint Mate on the flash drive is a fully operational operating system. Due to the persistent nature of the installation it can be setup, tuned, and tweaked like an operating system on a system disk and the settings will remain. I often use this Mint Mate flash drive to run a PC. It is a very safe and fast method to navigate on the internet. Another safe method is to run Mint Mate in a virtual partition.

In the next chapter you find tutorials that explain how to setup Mint Mate and how to install it in a virtual partition.





5. Setup of Mint Mate




These tutorials explain how to setup Mint Mate. The first 7 videos cover the following subjects

• Basic setup after installation
• Refining the Theme and Skin
• Start Menu and Taskbar settings
• Terminal window setup
• Installing and uninstalling Programs
• Screen Recording
• Screenshots and snips

In addition, there is a link to a PDF with the topic : Installation of Mint Mate in VMware Player. This section contains a written tutorial and three videos.

If you are interested in the subject, download the control sheet (a PDF) from my Skydrive

Related Tutorials

---

• http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...ate-live-cd-dvd-usb-use-emergency-backup.html
• How to Copy & Paste in Recovery Console on Windows 7 or Vista

 

[maxseven]

You still haven't said why you use "with older drives". Are you just talking about age, and wear/tear/errors associated w/same? An NTFS problem is an NTFS problem whether PATA or SATA isn't it?????

 

[Night Hawk]

With Ubuntu live, Knoppix for DVD Live, Linux Mint, and a few others the NTFS volumes will still be available regardless of whether or not you have an old 120gb ide or 1tb Sata 3 drive. The type won't make any difference while some older releases of distros going back 5-7yrs. might have problems with SSDs. The more recent releases have been updated since.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Wolfgang I am downloading the latest Mint (17) and it is 1.2GB - so much larger than the 14 which downloaded really quite quickly is this normal for this ISO as it looks like it might be an all night job (after half an hour it is still at 0.1 download) and I don't remember it taking that long before.
My rig is really quite fast so am curious on how long it should take.
John

 

[Night Hawk]

If that is the 17.2 expect to be over 1gb in size. That features the new Cinnamon desktop as well as including the OS installer not simply just being another live only download. The Debian flavor of the 17.2 weighed in at 1.26gb on disk here.

I have the 17.2 running on a few VMs both desktops at the present time as well as written to the second primary on one of the two 128gb flash drives while it won't boot live from flash drive if the UEFI and Secure Boot is enabled! Found that out fast here when just getting in a W10 laptop where the UEFI setting in the bios is greyed out when wanting to see if it would boot from a usb drive in case of a repair or OS refresh was needed at some time. Fortunately a full system image backup was made as soon as the last of the items going on was finished.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Thanks mate it finally downloaded after quite a while (I was using 3.0 port and stick) I thought at first it would be longer anyway got it on sticks now to try out

 

[whs]

I am sorry for the big downloads. But that is beyond my control.

 

[ThrashZone]

Yep I kind of waiting to see what is happening with Zorin 10
It says updates till January 2016
Zorin OS - Download

 

[Night Hawk]

Thanks mate it finally downloaded after quite a while (I was using 3.0 port and stick) I thought at first it would be longer anyway got it on sticks now to try out

One thing I found over the years whether downloading from either from a domestic(more local here) or other server it would take a bit longer for a distro then for other types of downloads including the latest GParted release. A good number of those are privately funded if not a school type rather then the typical fast servers a software company will provide for it's customer base.

Another thing you likely have to take into account how many may be downloading the exact same from that same server at any given moment. With any smaller slower type server it can bogged down rather quickly. For quite some time I would download and save each new release ending up with a collection I had to sift through from not wanting to have to download the same all over again due to the longer time period commonly seen. The latest GParted Live 23.0.1 iso came in at only 244mb but took long enough from a university for that. That grew in size from the 11.0.1 release seeing only a 114mb size download that took it's time several years ago.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Yep thanks everyone have got the 32bit and 64bit versions now and am going to try it on my tester machine this afternoon

 

[Night Hawk]

I would run the 32bit for sure on a VM since one look at your specs for the tester build showing 8gb will only result in seeing the 4-5gb mapped out to hardwares while the 64bit can benefit from that amount of ram available. One thing to note however is that for the most even with the 64bit you will likely never even come close to the need for the extra memory even with some of the largest Linux apps until you get into the programming end.

It took long enough for MS to realize the modular WinMin kernel with 7 after Vista simply grew too big and has continued on with that with the newer versions. One is certain however and that will be how fast the 17.2 goes on as far as the installation time despite the size of the iso you downloaded as well as no need to be expecting a ton of updates waiting for you.

MS has finally started to take after the example there of seeing everything new rolled up into the next release which for Windows 10 was to see the July 29th build updated by the upgrade to the newer Threshold 1 Update seen in November rather then the wait for any service packs. I would also add that if you hadn't already been familiar with Linux Mint that the Debian flavor also in both kernels is loaded with options for some 200 apps. Whether LM or LMDebian this particular has been made much more user friendly for the typical Windows user.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Ok have it running on three machines now (testing) but I cannot quite work out how to set an admin password and the only reason I can think is that I am running it from a stick and not the hard drive?

I have tried the authenticate and used the given password but it tells me it is incorrect.

I have to admit it is confusing with different titles for different actions perhaps I am not using the right one??

 

[Night Hawk]

The complete install or even on a VM will automatically require you to enter an admin password. You will find that just about everything will prompt for the password once a physical install or VM is seen to.

While booting live however you are still in the demo mode unless the distro is one that is live only. Knoppix for cd and grew for live dvd was an old Debian distro that was totally live only. That was written up about a decade ago for being a data recovery tool.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

The complete install or even on a VM will automatically require you to enter an admin password. You will find that just about everything will prompt for the password once a physical install or VM is seen to.

While booting live however you are still in the demo mode unless the distro is one that is live only. Knoppix for cd and grew for live dvd was an old Debian distro that was totally live only. That was written up about a decade ago for being a data recovery tool.

Ok mate I shall swap out the Windows drive on that machine and use a spare SSD for an install. Thanks for the heads up

 

[Night Hawk]

That would make things quite a bit easier for you. That was one thing noticed right away with any physical installs was the need to always have a password which became the master password for everything in the distro being looked over.

Instead of the UAC you had to constantly enter the password for each change in settings even the background or particular theme. You'll find out soon enough!

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Thanks again am about to start setting up that machine now. I think once I get past the differenet terms the GUI stuff I reckon I could be using it a bit more. My previous experience was not that long only because Windows had such a great system in 7.

 

[whs]

Make an easy password because you will be asked very often. I always use 1234.

 

[Night Hawk]

For the 17.2 Linux Mint or Linux Mint Debian the installation will go easy enough for you. You will be using GParted since that is the default partition manager there and while booted live you can see VFat Ext4 if not Ext 5 as well as Fat 32 and NTFS when you want to clear off the Linux stuff afterwards.

Here I put on Paragon's ExtFS for Windows and still haven't been able to mount anything VFat as of yet. That is supposed allow you to mount Linux volumes while in Windows which would enable file sharing as well as manual backups between the different OSs.
Paragon ExtFS for Windows

For personal
use only
​

Paragon ExtFS for Windows is a special utility which allows you to get full accesxt2 / Ext3 / Ext4 in Windows. With Paragon Ext for Windows, you can work with a Linux native file system using Windows. Just plug in your hard disk with Ext2/3/4 partitions to your PC and you can instantly modify files on Linux partition.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Am obviously doing something wrong but I have now tried seven ties to install onto a SSD from the stick.
I go though all the steps and it apparently installs but at the login screen I enter the password I wanted during the install and it tells me it is the incorrect password ahev tiored the computer name as the PW but same result.

I am trying to get the 64bit version on 17.1 and 17.3 and the only success is the 32bit version so what gives with the 64bit version??

 

[Night Hawk]

I haven't run any SSDs here since there's an issue as far as not being able to clean those off thoroughly as well as only seeing writes to drives and the price tag for a good sized model like a 1tb. It's likely however that the installation is lacking something that either didn't go on fully or the less likely reason that you tried this on an SSD instead of a spinner which makes less sense since these latest releases would certainly already have seen the support added in now for several years!

I suspect the first of not seeing something go on fully as the cause. Of course I also run with the Linux Mint Debian alternative being Debian compatible while you went for the regular LM.

Another potential problem of course with your mention of "stick" would be a bad write to the flash drive! When going to to download any newer release of LMD I burn in on a dvd-r as well as seeing it written to a flash drive mainly using UltraISO since other apps like WingToUSB, ISO to USB, UNetBootin, and other flash drive tools never seem to be reliable! That is also seen with Windows as well as Linux iso disk images being put on flash drives.

And then the download itself might just be what needs to be replaced? You may have seen a bad download which can happen at times especially when the download server is either busy with traffic or it isn't that well maintained.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Ok another day and am trying again and I guess it could be any of those things as you folks know it better than I do. Plus I did notice that some of the downloads were really quite quick rather than the first couple of times I tried so maybe the download was corrupt or something or maybe I wasn't leaving enough persist?

Now the brand of stick I was using Lexar I have never been a real fan of only that they are usually slightly cheaper than the others The 32bit version went fine except I wasn't caught up with passwords and it was a Toshiba stick. So this time I am trying SanDisk a brand I do like.

I also tried leaving the drive unallocated (after a clean) and formatted to FAT32 and I am going to try the unallocated way first. It is a pity the download would not load straight onto the drive (120GB SanDisk formatted FAT32) instead of a stick but I don't know if that would work either.

But little I have used the system via the stick does seem a good alternative to Windows.