I'm pretty new to Linux and I've only installed Ubuntu as I couldn't afford to buy Windows, worked well and I liked it. But I chose to upgrade it to the newest version after a prompt. The update froze and the machine was unresponsive which forced me to hard reboot it.

Now nothing seems to load and I've reached my wits end (mainly cos I'm lost in all the command lines).

I've decided to try and recover my data from the hard drive, only two folders, by selecting the try Ubuntu option when I insert the OS CD into the machine. The problem I'm experiencing now is it won't let me copy my folders, I get a 'The folder contents could not be displayed. You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of "folder_name".'

Does anyone know how I can recover this data?