[Nottingham] Help with Ubuntu 10.10 - Graphical interface crash (I think!)

[Barry Allen]

Hi all,

I am a Linux novice and I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 10.4 to 10.10. The reason was due to 10.4 refusing me to upgrade an increasing number of programs due to authorisation failures. I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 without any problems and used it quite happily for a week but then I started the PC as normal and since then Ubuntu 10.10 only boots to the command line.

The PC did reboot quite a few times since the new installation which I put down to a problem with acpi (something that was a problem with 10.4) so I added acpi=off to the menu.lst and the number of reboots reduced dramatically (still did reboot but not as often). 

However my main problem is with the graphical interface as I know very little about using Linux via the command line.

I would normally re-install the operating system, however my wife reminded me we have a number of family photos on the hard disk which I forgot to backup to the external drive. I don't know how to do this using the command line and the directory where the photos are has spaces in the directory name (very foolish of me). My external drive is also connected by a USB port and I don't know how to find or mount it.

Would someone be able to help me. If you are aware of this problem (Graphical interface crash) with Ubuntu 10.10 could you provide a solution please.

Thank you


Barry