I have a laptop with ubuntu 9.10 which fails to start, and I want to copy the data from it to an external hard disk. I can login in recovery mode command line, but then I cannot mount the external hard drive. (in recovery mode I cannot write to the laptops hard drive) If I boot from an portable USB with mintlinux, I can mount the external harddrive, and copy most of the data from the laptop, however there is a dir which I have no rights to access under /home/user/Documents then I get a permission denied error. Are there any other options?