When the drive does umnount automatically after some time, you could think of using rsync to copy the files.
With rsync it is possible to:
When the connection to the drive is broken, rsync will leave all files already in place. Then when you restart the same command, rsync will see how much is already copied, and resume to copy the rest. This works even for large files, and for thousands of files. Once i did this over a slow connection, and restarted it every time the connection got lost over may be 2 days.
Yeah I have no idea, I just want to access my hard rive so I can back things up, but it’s simply not letting me, I get an error like; Failed to open directory, could not find, permission denied, input output error, etc, etc.
I can access it, it’ll just randomly boot me from it and give an error, I have no idea what’s going on and how my Manjaro install broke this bad. . .
Using a CD with manjaro on it to boot your PC. This is called live-manjaro. This does need no installation at all. When you start your PC, you press a specific button like F11 (every BIOS/UEFI has different ones. In my bios it is F11)
Then the bios will show you a selection of bootable devices.
like
a CD in your CD-Drive, or
a bootable USB-stick that is connected
Then you select this, and boot manjaro from there. So you are able to correct weired problems.
When you boot your USB-Stick, and don´t use chroot, then you should be able to install mc.
If this is not possible you will likely not be able to use this USB-Stic for rescuing your data, because you may need other programms that you may need to install while rescuing your data
When booting on a LiveUSB, the system you are using is the one on the USB.
By default, a LiveUSB is not persistable. So modifications you do on the LiveUSB will not persist after shutting down.
From that LiveUSB, you should be able to access your computer’s partitions, either from the file manager (Thunar) or from the terminal. Those partitions should show as removable drives.
Your computer’s partitions should be as persistable as were before, so modifications you do on those partitions will persist after shutting down.
Since the LiveUSB is not persistable, is you want to backup the data from one of your computer’s partitions, you need to copy them to another partition, either inside your computer (if you have multiple drives for instance) or to another external storage device.
chroot (and manjaro-chroot) allows your terminal to act as if it is on your computer’s system (if you used it on the right partition). This is how you can fix your computer’s system, by completing an update, change drivers or kernels, etc.
This works only in the terminal you used the command in.
The way i see it, you are currently fed more information than you can chew. So i advice you to take things slow and check whether the result of each step is as it should be, so you understand what you are doing.
Okay, I understand everything clearly now, so let’s take it slowly; I sincerely do not know why my Manjaro installation broke, is there a way to determine that?
Unfortunately, I also think it won’t be easy. It’ll require you to boot with the live ISO and enter the chroot environment again.
Also unfortunately, it seems after what I saw yesterday, it would perhaps be easier to reinstall it if, and only if you either don’t have too much data to backup to Cloud, or you’ve got another hard drive, or storage method handy.
P.S.: Sincere apologies for leading you to do something you didn’t understand yesterday. I was wrong for assuming you knew once you were successful, or at least according to what I saw.
Really, I should be the one apologizing, I have been using Manjaro for months and my incompetence has wasted time, but yes, I am simply going to ask how I can back up pertinent files to my Flash drive, I have a 16Gb flash drive and all I need to back up are Save games files and with files that simple aren’t obtainable anymore, personal stuff, and I REALLY don’t want to lose those.
It was on me to not back a weekly backup, after this point, I’ll make it a habit to consistently back up important files, If I did, I could of just shrugged and reformatted and reinstalled Manjaro, it would of been a bit time consuming, but that’s it. And if backing up my files is Easier, I’ll probably try that, how would one do that exactly? sudo pamac install mc as described? Anything else?
Midnight Commander isn’t really neccessary, it’s just sometimes easier for people to use. It looks a lot like Norton Commander used to back in the day.
You can also do this, as I mentioned:
But I don’t know how much data your stuff uses. It obviously has to be less than the USB drive’s size.
