[PLUG] How to back up files with no video

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sat Aug 30 15:34:26 UTC 2014


My System 76 Bonobo Extreme screen died. No display at all. it looks as
though the video cable is not even connected. For the past month and a
half it has suddenly started displaying a distorted screen, but
rebooting cured it. And it took a complete reboot - just restarting X
was not sufficient. because rebooting cured it i always suspected a
software problem, but diligent searches on the net failed to turn up
even one complaint about the GeForce GTX 765M and Linux. i have always
used just the default nouveau driver that Xubuntu 14.04.1 installed; no
proprietary drivers or even fancy stuff like bumblebee. And when i
rebooted this morning and got no video at all i booted to a 14.04.1
live DVD, but it gives me a black screen as well, so now we know there
is definitely a hardware failure somewhere.

of course, due to the perversity of inanimate matter, this happened
first thing Saturday morning of a three-day weekend. I can't contact
System76 until Tuesday. I am assuming i will have to ship it back to
Colorado, unless I get lucky and figure out some way to fix it myself.
It was new early last December, but I haven't checked the warranty yet.

The computer has two drives; / and /home are on a 480 GB SSD and there
is also a 1 TB hybrid drive, practically unused, and what little is on
it is expendable. i plan to remove the SSD before shipping it back to
System76, but I'd like to back up everything on it as well. Actually, a
complete disk copy (dd?) might be more appropriate. There is plenty of
space to do so either on my desktop or on an external USB drive. But I
don't know how to do so with a dead video. There is a share set up on
the laptop, but only for /media.

Does anyone have any suggestion?



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