[SOLVED] No permission to Copy to another disk

[andrew-lohmann]

Firstly appoligies if I posted in the wrong forum - This is probably a Linux System question?

What I am trying to do;
I have a 62 GB memory stick which I wish to use incase of some failure of or maintaince of Linux on my hard disk. I have installed Manjaro Xfce Linux on the memory stick which leaves me a large amount of space for data. My intention is to be able to compress and copy my home\andrew to the memory stick. To be able to do that from the Linux on the Hard Disk or the Linux on the memory stick.

The problem;
When I have tried this I have receive a permission error that has prevented me carrying out the copy action.

Attempted solutions;
In both Linuxes I have attempted to set the route directory andrew and all subdirectories to Read/Write for myself and other users.
This did not resolve the issue.

[wintpe]

ok i keep banging on about clonezilla.

but really in this case it will do exactly what you want.,

boot from the clonezilla CD and back the whole harddisk including any windows and linux to your USB drive.

should you loose your harddisk or make an upgrade or change that goes wrong, or just get a persistent virus on your
windows disk.

boot from the clonezilla cd and it will set you back exactly to how it was at the time you imaged it.

its not for everyone's needs, but it definitely does a ghost image of everything, and compresses it

your permision error could be that your not running as root, or that you are backing up a live mounted disk

regards peter

[andrew-lohmann]

Thanks Peter

I have briefly looked at; http://clonezilla.org/ I will look at that again but the disadvantage I see is that it will put the whole disk image back as it was. If I have done some maintainance on the Linux eg update or replace hardware that has left my data suspect but I still need to recover what I can. I will want to do is put back some of the directories and files from working areas like my user directory; andrew

I shall look at the root login that you suggest first.

Thanks

Once again

[doktor5000]

The problem is, that usually if you write an linux image to a flash drive, the remaining space on the drive is normally not usable due to the partitioning.
Changing permissions on the folders will not work, as it is mounted read-only.

What you're probably looking for is called persistence / persistent. Basically you write your linux image to the flash drive either with a special
tool which will take care about this, or you need to add a partition later on where you can store files later on when booted from the flash drive,
so that it works essentially as an usual linux installation on harddrive.


The other possibility is not to write the installation image to the flash drive, but rather install your linux to the flash drive. That's like doing a normal installation, but as target you need to select your flash drive.

You may want to read about this a bit more for Manjaro: http://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=570.0
And in general: http://www.maketecheasier.com/persisten ... nstall-usb

[andrew-lohmann]

Thanks for the links Doktor

I have installed Manjaro to the USB stick as you have suggested. A number but not all Linux Distrubutions allow you to do this that is pick a USB stick and install as if it were a hard disk. I take the precaution of unplugging all other drives first. I also found that unequily, by the way, that Mageia allows me to add Windows and other Linuxes to the Boot menu provided I chose GRUB-2.

That did not resolve the copy issue.

Incedently my login name and password are the same for both installed Linuxes (Mageria and Manjaro)

[doktor5000]

Can you please describe again what you want to copy where?
When booted from the flash drive, you want to copy files from the installed linux system to the flash drive?

[andrew-lohmann]

That is correct Doctor.

For example I can with Mageia, copy files to a windows NTFS disk then do anything I want with those files using windows. I don't want to use Windows in any case.

I can see a Linux partition with another installation of Linux but I can't copy any files and directories..

[doktor5000]

Well, either the files/directories of the other linux partition use a different user ID than your current user (Mageia uses 500 by default, many other linux distros use 1000 as default) or the files/directories below to another user or even root.

Can you do an ls -al on the partition/files in question?

[andrew-lohmann]

I have found part of the answer.

I was trying to copy from the the directory with my user name - andrew
There is a hidden file within the dirctory that I do not have permission to move. If I skip that file (I am using copy to instead of compress) then copying proceeds without difficulty.

[andrew-lohmann]

Further to my reply I have been evaluating a number of distributions over the last few months. Ubuntu Mint openSUSE and I had come up against the same problem.

Thanks for your assitance
Andrew