X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc (solved)

[bootdoc]

Having a problem booting into X. after the battery went dead and i recharged it then booted and no more X. Just boots into console root mode. Tried dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg, then rebooted back to same root prompt. tried again and got the xorg configuration dialog but could not navigate it.

Any suggestons??

[dibl]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

Did the battery die while the computer was booted into Linux? It sounds like something with the KDM or video driver got snarfed in the process.

If you log in at the text prompt with your user login, and then run

sudo /etc/init.d/kdm start

maybe the error message will be useful.

[bootdoc]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

yeah, It died while logged in. Thanks for the reply. I will try your suggestion shortly.

[bootdoc]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

Tried /etc/init.d/kdm start
and got
no such file or directory.

[toad]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

did you type the sudo bit as well

[bootdoc]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

already at root prompt in recovery mode.
I have more info coming. The laptop is not mine. Have been trouble shooting over the phone. Client is emailing me the latest error message. Something is really screwed. Did su (username) to get to a user prompt then did sudo startkde. something about readonly filesystem, cannot mkdir (username), and something about the screen. I'll have more soon.

[bootdoc]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc



xsetroot: unable to open display ‘ ‘

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/home/ghdaniels’: Read-only file system

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/home/ghdaniels’: Read-only file system

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/home/ghdaniels’: Read-only file system

/usr/bin/startkde: 71 cannot create /home/ghdaniels/.kde/share/config/startupcon

figkeys: Directory nonexistent

trying to create local folder /home/ghdaniels: Read-only file system

trying to create local folder /home/ghdaniels: Read-only file system

trying to create local folder /home/ghdaniels: Read-only file system

trying to create local folder /home/ghdaniels: Read-only file system

Error: Can’t open display:

.: 86: Can’t open /home/ghdaniels/.kde/share/config/startupconfig

ghdaniels@ghdaniels-laptop:/root$

[toad]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

Hm, so everything is mounted read only...

Best thing is to boot off a usb stick and repair via chroot or reinstall. I don't know what the others think or what your level of expertise is, but that is what I would suggest.

Qqmike wrote an excellent howto for creating a bootable kubuntu usb stick. A quick search should help you. A reinstall, however, is probably easier in the long run.

[bootdoc]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

thanks, i have a few install sticks. any ideas on why this happened?
i could use a little help with chroot.

[Snowhog]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

Sudden power loss means that the OS wasn't able to properly shut itself down. Think of what happens when one is running Windoze on a desktop and you remove the power cable.

Have the user reboot into recovery mode and issue the following command:

clear && df -hTxtmpfs

This will clear the console and report space stats on the mounted partitions. This is what my laptop is currently reporting:

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 ext3 7.9G 3.5G 4.0G 47% /
/dev/sda7 ext3 20G 712M 18G 4% /home
/dev/sda1 ext3 7.9G 2.7G 4.9G 36% /media/sda1
/dev/sda2 ext3 7.9G 3.2G 4.3G 43% /media/sda2
/dev/sda5 ext3 20G 182M 19G 1% /media/sda5
/dev/sda6 ext3 20G 7.2G 12G 39% /media/sda6

What one is interested in is the percentage of space available on the root and /home partitions. If both are reported as 0% that would explain the system being mounted as read-only.

[toad]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

Nice one, Snowhog.

Just to recap (and please expand, everybody!).

Reasons for ro mount:

1 - no space
2 - improper shutdown (however, after a boot and proper shutdown the system should boot rw again)
3 - kernel bug which is supposedly fixed as of version 2.6.22 onwards

@ bootdoc

Try Snowhog's fact finding mission first. As for chroot, it is dead handy! You boot from a usb stick, find out the name of the original eeepc / (I've seen one of them once on which a mate installed xubuntu, it had quite a weird /dev point like sdg or summat), mount that file system, open a root shell and type "chroot /mount_point_of_eeepc_kubuntu"

Now you are de facto root in your kubuntu...

Oh dear, as I am writing this I see that there is no point in doing this, as you already have root access. DOH!!! Sorry, I'm tired...

In that case just boot normally and ascertain how things are mounted. First off with "mount -l"

Right, good night! Too much swimming this morning has me knackered...

[bootdoc]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc

tried clear && df -hTxtmpfs and it came back command not found in path /usr/bin/blah blah.

The laptop is being shipped to me. I hope to have it tomorrow. I'll know more then.

[bootdoc]

Re: X gone after battery drain and reboot on eeepc (solved)

I got the laptop today. Booted up and it went to busy box. fsck failed run fsck manually, so I did and restarted. booted fine.