DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

[dibl]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

Dibl... followed your instructions ...

Errrrr .... I don't think so. I said

When you boot Recovery Mode, and from the recovery menu choose "Drop to root prompt", you should be at a "#" root prompt. Was that what you saw?

But you said you rebooted to the Kubuntu login. There is no Kubuntu login if you boot Recovery Mode. So, what's up?

[kubobbu]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

Dibl... at the end of your instructions was "shutdown now -r" and that is what brought me to the KDE login screen. I executed all of your instructions at the # root prompt.

I assume the -r means Reboot, and that is what it did... started over and brought me to the login.

As you can see from my answer to Snowhog, the real problem is that basically nothing happened... after all the steps, the result was 0 downloaded, 0 installed, 0 removed...

Is there a command from the # prompt that would let me remove any such files directly... if I knew where to look, I'm guessing I could ls the directory, and then rm the files, one by one if needed.

Thanks for your help this far.

Bob

[MoonRise]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

OK. Please post the output to show your hard drive space left that you did @ the beginning of the thread as that is what is theorised as to the issue. If the commands executed without any real error messages then lets hope it did clear some space. We can go from there.

[dibl]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

OK, I understand now (I think) how you got to where you are -- we've eliminated a full package cache as a source of problems. In reviewing the thread, I believe there are too many open questions about the hardware system that we're dealing with.

1. Can you boot a Live CD that has Parted on it, and use that to take a look at the hard drive. How many partitions? What is on them? So far you've accounted for 66GB of Windows and 10GB of Linux, on an 80GB hard drive. I'd like to know the rest of the story -- it may provide the easiest answer to the potential shortage of partition space.

2. What is that hardware, anyway? As far as I know, the GPU could possibly be suffering from the same problem that this fellow had:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...6465#msg256465

So, in the Konsole use

lspci -v

and post the output here.

3. Once we've eliminated the above questions as being relevant to the problem, we'll consider the possibility that one or more files in the /home/user directory has been inadvertently given root-only permissions, which is also a cause of the "login loop" problem.

[MoonRise]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

Once we've eliminated the above questions as being relevant to the problem, we'll consider the possibility that one or more files in the /home/user directory has been inadvertently given root-only permissions, which is also a cause of the "login loop" problem.

That is what I was going to lean towards after eliminating the issue of disk space, but you beat me to it!

[dibl]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

you beat me to it!

Thanks Moon -- among the things I'm often accused of, speedy is not one!

[kubobbu]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

OK guys... I'm going to close Windows and go attempt Linux again.. I will drop to the root prompt and try your suggestions.

Before I do, can you suggest some way I can copy the outputs you request and bring them back here... I did the HD stats longhand, but the output of that lspci -v command is going to be rather lengthy.

Please keep in mind that this problem arose between shutting down at 11:30PM and the next time I attempted to start up the next day. This is what leads me to believe that it was something in the updates I downloaded and installed just before shutting down.

By the way, Moonrise, the HD stats did not change at all after all the "autoremove..clean" actions.

Thanks again to all for the help to this point.

Bob

[dibl]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

When X is running, if you do something like "lspci" in the Konsole window, you can open kate, then copy from the console and paste into kate, and save it as a .txt file with a name that you can recognize.

[kubobbu]

Re: DISASTER.... PLEASE HELP!!

Sorry for the long delay, but a very busy weekend, and a flooded basement today from a non-functioning sump pump cut into my computer time.

I got the partition information: /dev/sda1 70.9GB /dev/sda2 10.6GB /dev/sda5 485.3MB, so that accounts for the full 80GB drive and then some.

I'm going to have to go back for the lspci information... I need to research how to open Kate from the root prompt and copy that info and then save it to the USB drive where I can access it under Windows.

In fact, if I can figure out how to copy a couple of vital data files to my USB backup drive, which has most of my data already, I may just bite the bullet and re-load Linux, with a larger space allocation this time.

Thanks again...
Bob