/home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

[The Liquidator]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Thanks Vinny I'll give it some thought tomorrow.

Got to get some sleep now.

BTW gparted sees the partitions but because of its age sees them as ext3. Does not return any free space info for either though.

Doesn't look good though

[verndog]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

OK 1 in 5 boots is successful.

blah@blah:~$sudo blkid
...
blah@blah:~$ cat /etc/fstab
...
blah@blah:~$ sudo fdisk -lu
...

I see you've listed pretty much everything except grub. Are you using grub-legacy or grub2?

Have you just tried and reinstall grub?

Maybe sounds redundant, but I have heard of success from others.

In any case I would like to examine either menu.lst or grub.cfg whichever one you have installed.

[lmilano]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Liquidator: have you tried fsck yet? I have seen many a folk recover by apparent full disaster by simply running fsck on a partition. It could also be the partition table, a disk failure in the wrong place can be very damaging! (if that's what it is). But some times partition tables are recoverable.

You can run all this from a liveCD. If there is something not installed, say gparted, you can install from in the live CD (it installs in RAM)

Good luck

[The Liquidator]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

No I haven't. The fact that the partition can be seen but not read made me wonder whether it's something to do with the partition table- after all I would not expect a simple shut-down to physically delete 20odd gigabytes of data.

I would lve to recover this if I can. The status as we speak is:

Ubuntu live can see (and open) the root partition but can not even see home. Mandriva can see that both partitions are there but cannot open either. Will running fsck overcome that?

I would also point out that we are experiencing sub zero temperatures here in the UK. the laptop did spend about half an hour in the boot of my car on the way home from work. So far I have dicounted that as a reason (as it did boot normally once last night). Maybe I'm wrong here?

Can you give me some advice please as to how I would run fsck from a live cd?

Thanks

Ian

[lmilano]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Ian, from a live CD (make sure it supports ext4, any recent distro should), first you need to identify the name of the partition. Gparted for instance would tell you that. Then, you just run

sudo fsck -pf /dev/sdXX

In you case it may be sda2, etc. Of course sudo is only used by some distributions, some others may just give you a root shell, so you will only need to run

fsck -pf /dev/sdXX

You can always run "fsck --help" to see the options and what they do.

Best luck!

[toad]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Not sure, but hasn't he got reiserfs? Isn't it fsck.reiserfs /dev/sdXX in that case?

[verndog]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Not sure, but hasn't he got reiserfs? Isn't it fsck.reiserfs /dev/sdXX in that case?

Yes he does and I hope the OP comes back and tries the fsck.reiserfs check.

[lmilano]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

AFAIK modern distros use fsck as a wrapper for the different FS specify fsck utilities. Also, Ian (Liquidator) is using ext4, I thought ....

[verndog]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

This is the problem when topics get hijacked.

The OP( 51m0n), is using reiserfs.

Liquidator should have opened his own thread so we don't get this cross talk.

[The Liquidator]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Point taken but my error message was exactly the same, hence my post, as I thought we both had an identical problem.

I have run gparted as suggested by Leo, and now question whether this is a filesystem issue (ext3/4 reiser) at all. Gparted was able to see the partition (including type and free space) but the live distro per se was not. I believe this is because the partition has somehow lost its UUID and as a result has no mount point assigned to it, In the light of this I would expect exactly the same error message as I'm getting on boot - the system is looking for a UUID but can't find it.

Now, if I could reinstate the mount point for the partition my suspicion is that this will fix it. I could reinstall but if I can do it without that would be nice.

Gparted does not look like it can be used to reassign a mount point. Can anyone talk me through this one?

Thanks

Ian

[lmilano]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Ian, I am not sure what exactly you mean when you say that the live distro doesn;t see that partition, how do you try to see it? In Dolphin? Using "df"? Using blkid? This should show all UUIDs:

sudo blkid

Anyway, if you are sure that the partition can only be seen by gparted, then it must be a corrupted partition table. In that case, I think it is worth trying to recover it:
http://www.mohdshakir.net/2008/01/03...-live-cd-gpart

Once recovered, you can use blkid to list all the UUIDs from the live CD , and also from the live CD you can edit /etc/fstab in the root partition, and use the proper UUIDs for / and /home. In order to navigate filesystems as super user you can do "kdesudo dolphin". You can also use "kdesudo kate" to open the text editor as superuser. I realize you know some of these things, but they may be useful to other people reading this

Cheers!
Leo

[verndog]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

...I could reinstall but if I can do it without that would be nice...

I agree.

I looked back at your first post (#25). It does appear you may have the same error, but can you supply the info that the OP gave, namely:

sudo blkid
cat /etc/fstab
sudo fdisk -lu

also what grub installed, 1, or 2. If grub2, do a ls from gurb prompt to see if it see's all partitions.

Also output of either grub.lst or grub.cfg.

Even though you think you examined it carefully, another set of eyes may help.

[The Liquidator]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Okay thanks.

I'm now running from the live CD so can now post outputs:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo blkid
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/sda1: UUID="a45dda51-ae65-40f7-9346-63be61c0a131" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda6: UUID="94c3bab9-5112-4c54-971d-65a2a98a41b9" TYPE="swap"
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/fstab
aufs / aufs rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sda6 swap swap defaults 0 0
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sda: 58.5 GB, 58506416640 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7113 cylinders, total 114270345 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe686f016

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 31246424 15623181 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 31246425 114270344 41511960 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 31246488 110366549 39560031 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 110366613 114270344 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

Sorry but where will I find grub.lst as the locations produced by whereis reveal nothing?

Thanks

Ian

[lmilano]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

So, sda5 is your /home partition, only detected by fdisk, right?

[The Liquidator]

Re: /home: waiting for /dev/disk/by-uuid STILL stops a clean boot

Yes