Can't log in all of a sudden

[Princey]

Hi all

I live in an area that's prone fo frequent power outages. Lately, we're getting them twice or more a week. Yesterday, when I got home from work, I discovered there was no power. Upon return, I booted up normally save for a few error messages of files not being 'clean'. I searched for the UPS software I once used using 32 (I run 64 bit now) and installed. Everything went fine. I rebooted to make sure things worked well, and sure did. Booted back up safely and I was contented. I shut down the comp on my way out this morning to work but forgot a project I had to copy to my thumb drive, booted back up and I was presented with a message after logging in.

can't start kstartupconfig. check your installation

Ok, wasn't the first time I saw that message, so I booted into safe mode and tried the normal trick that works

sudo chown -R princey:users /home/princey

and hit the enter key. After typing my password, I got an error message

chown error can't find /home/princey
file/directory cannot be found

Now, that shook me off a bit so I tried the next trick I know would work

sudo chown -R princey:users .kde

and got the same error message. I tried substituting 'users' with 'princey', but nothing worked. I booted back to the LiveCD and searched the forums. One person got theirs working with

sudo rm -r /home/princey/ .kde/

That appeared to have done something, but couldn't log in. Finally, I tried typing

kstartupconfig

in the terminal to see if I'd get any error messages. I got the following:

trying to create local folder //.kde/share: permission denied

so I tried doing a listing of my drives seeing that /home resides on a partition by itself. Sure, it's listed. But when I do the

ls

command I do see the home directory. But changing to that directory, there's nothing in there. Apparently, it's not using the /home partition but created a /home directory on the /boot partition.

Using Knoppix, my home partition is accessable. I can access any file there on that partition, how do I get Kubuntu to see my home partition as the right /home directory?

[jankushka]

Re: Can't log in all of a sudden

could you pls post the result of the following:

df -h

cat /etc/fstab

ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid/

ls -ld /home

if your /home is still there we should be able to get it back easily.
well...hopefully :P

[Princey]

Re: Can't log in all of a sudden

Thanks for the reply. I'll have to reboot and type everything out by hand then write it all out as I don't have a GUI to copy and paste to and from. I'll be back with the results.

[Princey]

Re: Can't log in all of a sudden

Update.

After finding out that I can get a gui using the

startx

command, I was able to copy out the results of the commands. From the first command

df -h

I noticed that fstab wasn't listing my home partition although it showed up in the third command

ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid

What I did was to copy the uuid out and manually enter it into fstab, adding the rest of the details that should go with it. Rebooted, and here I am posting from my Kubuntu install. Thanks for the pointer in the right direction. 8)