Major Fail ...bios corruption...keyboard not working

Well last night I installed some software, well a few pieces of software actually and I didn't check them out just expected them to work and trusted the recommendations from a website. The articles name was something about "Things to install after a new install of Mint Petra" or something like that.
I was really tired and didn't switch the PC off that night just fell asleep on the sofa till this morning. i headed back to the PC and was just sorting e-mail and messaging friends when....Shutdown. The PC just crashed.

I have been messing about with help from the Mint forum's, changing my bios memory settings as Mint seems not to recognise both my memory chips on my ASROCK 960GM motherboard. I thought maybe this was it.

Or the problems I've had with USB 3.0 connections also. Maybe this was all connected to my current troubles in hindsight.

Anyway on boot up again, my keyboard was not recognised and I was unable to get into bios to check things there. I got the GRUB menu but with no keyboard I couldn't access my Desktop either.
I disconnected all my USB connections and tried the keyboard and mouse in other USB ports first (I've heard some motherboards will only recognise the first USB port), no luck, then up to the loft for an old style keyboard and mouse. plugged them in to the Din sockets. nothing again. The PC was still not working just hitting GRUB and staying there waiting for  input from the non existent keyboard.

I needed help from the internet.

No computer ....

Up to the loft again and I pulled out one of my old PC's (I never seem to get around to getting rid of them) and 3 hours later after searching through several Hard disks to find a working one I know have a running Intel 2Core E8400 with 1mb ram and 160gig hard disk. I loaded the Mint Live CD I always keep around up. It had Nadia on it so just used that to download Petra and burnt over that copy (it's on a re-writeable). I know I could have updated in other ways but it just seemed the simplest.

Anyway I now have second PC to play with and this one has a floppy disk on it so i can check out those dozens of really old floppy disks I have lying about that I've meant to check for anything interesting I may have put on them years ago.

Back to my immediate problem. After some forum searches I decided to replace the Bios battery in the faulty PC. This didn't work to get the keyboard running again but now I had access to my cloud storage (where I keep PDF manuals of all the stuff I have) I could check out the Motherboard manual and reset the Bios jumpers.

Well this has worked, I have my Keyboard working again.
My first thing to do now is what is happening this second. Back-up... I've loaded the Mint Petra disk on the faulty PC and I am copying all the files in the home folder to a second Hard drive. There's a lot and really this has not been done for a while so it also gives me a chance to sort the trash in there out as well.

***USEFUL BIT***
It seems when you use the LIVE CD it will not let you copy files from one drive to another. It says permission denied. To bypass this a quick search told me I needed to be administrator to do this, which makes sense. To be able to do this on the Desktop all you need to do is right click on the folder you want to copy from and open as root then right click on the folder you will be sending to and open that as root also. you can then pull files and folders over. Use go up one folder on the folder menu to access that folder to open it's child.

I'm thinking I may just do a re-install as I can't find any answers yet on how to remove a program from a broken installation from the terminal in a Live CD. I assume it may be possible but being root and checking the dependencies in where-ever the list of programs are kept by the package manager.
I'm thinking this just because Windows kept things in the Registry. I may be wrong but this is all a learning process eh.
At least I've got a spare PC out of this mess to use to sort things out with.

Opening a graphical program from Terminal

One thing I have had to work out myself as it may seem obvious to many or it may be stated somewhere I've never looked is sudo and gksudo

I've come across errors many times in Terminal such as

IBUS-WARNING

Gtk-WARNING

This I now know is because I was trying to open a programme with a graphical front end from within the Terminal.

I now know if I try to open it as root using the sudo command I need to do it as gksudo. This is to warn the system it is opening a graphical programme which may have other environmental variables it needs to set up which would not be otherwise.


So for example in Terminal and wanting to use gedit (the editing programme) I use from the command line:

$ gksudo gedit

and not

$ sudo gedit