"Nautilus could not create /home..."

[Anthm]

release: 13 (maya)
edition: Cinnamon 32-bit
no partitions
fairly low-power laptop

This problem started out of the blue, I wasn't re-installing or anything. The computer worked just fine until someone plugged in their external hard drive, it froze, and the restart failed.

It loads the OS, but I get the error "Nautilus could not create the following required folders: /home/me/Desktop, /home/me/.config/nautilus" I can still use the terminal, but nothing else works.

Being a newb, after trying to dick around with the permissions for a while and failing, my best idea was to try starting over and installing a new distro. So I made a boot stick that tests fine on other machines, my Ubuntu desktop will boot from it. But the laptop gives me "this is not a bootable disk."

I'm at a loss for what else to do.

[Fornhamfred]

How did you install Mint originally?

I would use a live cd and copy your home folder and then re-install Mint. It is always good to have a separate home partition.

[Anthm]

From a USB stick, long since re-purposed.

How would a liveCD be different from the liveUSB I already tried?

Assuming I get a liveCD to actually boot, how/to where do I copy the home folder? Somewhere external, or to a partition....? I don't actually know how partitions work. I should probably go find a tutorial.

[Fornhamfred]

OK

I prefer to work from a dvd but that is a personal preference.

What I was suggesting is that from the live boot you could copy your home file to an external drive or usb stick.

As far as partitioning is concerned this thread should help: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/04/25/ma ... nt-debian/

In the live boot you can use gparted to set up the partitions, say 20gb for the root partition formatted to ext4

A swap partition twice the size of your physical ram and the remainder formatted to ext4 as your home partition.

Hope this helps.