not able to login to 7.04

[dibl]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

I'm not clear on why everything would have to be deleted from that big partition presently mounted on /media.

Actually, I think you're correct on that, Opie -- I think it should be OK there.

Rather the /home directory on the 7GB partition would need to be cleared wouldn't it?

This seems to be a problem -- I don't understand why she has not had any success deleting data from it.

If she moves some of the data clogging up her 7GB partition, especially what is presently /home, to that large free partition she should then be able to mount that large partition later at /home without having to wipe its contents shouldn't she?

Actually, I think if it ALL (/home) went over to /hdb3, then she could proceed to change the mount point for /hdb3 to /home, and have all her data. But for some reason her ability to get into /home and do anything with it seems to be impaired at the moment by the lack of a GUI.

@ponygal, here's a thought. Can you cd to the /tmp directory? Do a pwd to make double-sure that's where you are. Then issue "sudo rm -f *" and that will nuke whatever little bit of spare stuff is in there. Possibly it will free enough space to let you boot back into the GUI.

[opie]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

"i am working with microsoft to try to fix it. if i can not fix windows soon i'll wipe it out and put in another copy of windows but trying to save windows at this point."

From what I am seeing you have windows installed on a separate 74GB drive. Is this not the case?
You don't need to fool with that drive at all. It is mounted on /media but that doesn't mean that it is taking up space on your / partition.

I agree with the others that, when you installed, you thought you set up your large hdb1 partition to mount at /home, but you didn't do something correctly and the result was that the system was set up so root and your home directories are all in your little 7GB partition. That was a good catch tracking that down dibl.

EDIT:
I agree with your last post dibl. This is why I think it would make sense to run linux from the livecd rather than trying to do this while the hard drive filesystem is "live".

[ponygirldefiance]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

it said this

rm: cannot remove `Desktop': Is a directory

i have nothing to move that i can see but my hard drives. the only thing i downloaded to this was a few of the updates so i could download wine, wine , qt parted, and ntfs fused everything else is from the cd

Opie yes your correct about the windows hard drive being completly seperate.

probably did set something up wrong but how do we fix it now?

[dibl]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

rm: cannot remove `Desktop': Is a directory

Whoa -- you were apparently NOT at the /tmp prompt when you did that!

I've got to take my head cold off to bed now. Opie's suggestion to boot the Live CD is a good one, if you want to have a GUI in which to move whatever is presently in /home over to /hdb3. If you could just do that much, probably your system would boot normally. I believe you have not yet deleted any meaningful amount of data out of the /home directory, which is preventing it from booting. As soon as you do, it will probably boot.

Good luck with it -- I'll check back tomorrow.

[ponygirldefiance]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

Opie i don't know how to do this live cd work your talking about care to walk me through it?

[opie]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

Ponygirl I just didn't want you to do something in haste that might cause further problems. I wasn't sure how clear you were on the idea of mount points and I was afraid you might start cleaning out the things mounted to media, which would have trashed your windows install. As I said, those things aren't taking up space on your linux / partition. If you can put this off until tomorrow I'm sure the others will walk you through things.

dibl I wasn't trying to take over the thread. I just felt I had a bit to contribute. You and others have done the work on this and I'll try to stay out of the way.

[ponygirldefiance]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

Opie thanks i have nothing to lose here really. even if i lost windows microsoft can't seem to figure out how to get an original copy of windows to update so if it got trashed i just would have to reinstall it as well as i nothing on there but things from a cd.

anyways i'll be around this evening through the morning then i'll be gone most of the day tomorrow so if you want you have some time to think about this one.

[dibl]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

dibl I wasn't trying to take over the thread. I just felt I had a bit to contribute. You and others have done the work on this and I'll try to stay out of the way.

On the contrary, Opie your suggestion was spot-on -- you saw an approach that did not occur to me. That's the value of the Forum -- lots of eyes and brains can do a better job of understanding a problem.

@ponygal, only you can decide whether you would rather start over with a reinstallation of Windows, which we have not helped you with, and Linux as well, or whether you would like to spend more time repairing the existing Linux installation, which appears to be quite feasible and not terribly complicated, either.

If you want to fix Kubuntu, Opie's approach is the best. It goes like this, at the top level:

1. Make a Kubuntu Live CD (if you don't have one already) and boot it.
2. Make two mount points, one each for your hdb1 and hdb3.
3. Mount the two partitions.
4. Using Dolphin or Konqueror or whatever, move the contents of the /home/ponygal directory that is in the filesystem on hdb3 into the partition at hdb1.
5. Edit the /etc/fstab file that is in the filesystem on hdb3, changing the mount point of hdb1 from /media to /home.
6. Reboot your system and be happy!



Opie, if I've not described the sequence accurately, please speak up with . And then if we need to fill in the finer details of those steps, it is not a problem.



Finally, I will note that if you can't fix Windows and decide it needs to be re-installed, then by all means do that first -- then deal with Linux. The converse is harder.

[ponygirldefiance]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

i still have a question though. even if i had it set up wrong why did i use my 7GiG for the OS and a few updates? shouldn't i have still had plenty of room left? so the thing i am puzzled over is where did all of this GB's come from on a bare system?

Dibl yes i would like a little more in detail how to fix this problem on the boot cd as i have only loaded the OS by cd never did corrections before

thanks

[dibl]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

i still have a question though. even if i had it set up wrong why did i use my 7GiG for the OS and a few updates? shouldn't i have still had plenty of room left?

Because your /home directory was there in the 7GB partition along with your OS and filesystem, I assume you put some data there in your user folder. Music? Images? Whatever you put in your user folder was in the 7GB partition. The OS would take up probably 4.5GB or so, so you only had to add another 2.5GB to break it.

OK, let me try some finer points, keyed to the 6 steps above.

1. Make sure the "Boot Sequence" in your BIOS is set to boot from the CD ROM drive first, then the hard drive. Possibly you already have the Kubuntu Live CD, which you may have used to install your system in the first place. If you have it, boot it. If you don't have a Kubuntu Live CD, you'll need to make one, as follows:

Using a PC with a CD burner, download the ISO from here:

http://www.kubuntu.org/download.php#latest

Just pick a mirror nearest you, and then get the Live CD ISO for your PC. Use your CD burning software to "burn as ISO" or "burn CD Image" (NOT "make Data CD!).

2. When the Live CD is booted and you are running Kubuntu (on the PC with the broken system), open KMenu>System>Konsole and make 2 new mount points:

sudo mkdir /media/hdb1

sudo mkdir /media/hdb3

3. Mount your Linux hard drive partitions to the 2 new mount points:

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /media/hdb1

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb3 /media/hdb3

Verify that they are now mounted partitions by entering

df -h

4. Now you can open Dolphin or Konqueror, split the window, and in one window browse to /media/hdb3 and find the /home/ponygal directory (i.e. your user folder), and view the contents. In the other window browse to /media/hdb1, which is the large partition that has only 750M of data in it. Make a new directory in it for "ponygal", and any other users who presently use your /home directory (if any). You can grab all the folders and files that are in your exiting /ponygal user folder, and drag them over to the hdb1 partition, to the new /ponygal directory, and choose "move here", and let them be relocated. Same with any other users' data in the existing /home directory. This could be done from the Konsole window using the "mv" command, but I have the impression your CLI skills are not much better than mine, making the GUI file managers a better bet. :P

Note: If you have other users with data in the /home directory, or if there is data in the /home directory outside the /home/ponygal folder, get it all!

5. Now you're ready to modify /etc/fstab to change the mount point for /dev/hdb1:

kdesu kate /hdb3/etc/fstab

(give the live CD password)

Scroll down to the line that shows /dev/hdb1 with the mount point as /media/linux/hdb1. The "/media/linux/hdb1" should be in red. Carefully edit that so it says "/home", and "save" the file.

Close Kate.

5.b. I just now realized you are going need to delete the existing /home directory that is in the existing Linux filesystem on /media/hdb3. So open Dolphin again, browse to /media/hdb3, and carefully delete just the "/home" directory/folder that you see there (which should be empty since you moved the contents to /media/hda1).

6. Now for the big test. Do a KMenu>Logout/Shutdown/Reboot", eject the Live CD, and observe your system return to life. I'll cross my fingers. Let us know if there are more issues, or if any of the above steps seems not to be working as described.

[Fintan]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

I don't want to interfere but I had a similar problem recently and believe that both dible and opie are correct in their assesment about making a separate /home and moving your "old" home over. Maybe this will be of some help:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/separatehome

Apparently hdb1 has enough space.

I hope this helps a bit and good luck

[ponygirldefiance]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

Dibl i can only get to number 3 completed when i try to number4 i get this.

xlib: connection to ":0,0" refused by server
xlib: No protocol specified

kdesu: cannot connect to X server :0,0


also when i try to move files it only allows me to copy but i can not delete the files i copied from once the transfer is finished. am i doing something wrong or did you miss something? or is this whole this not worth the time and energy any more?
thanks

[dibl]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

Hmmmmmm. OK, I guess that's because if your filesystem is overloaded, you can't run anything in the GUI. That error message says "I ain't runnin' no stinkin' GUI for you!"

Arggggggggghhhhh!

OK, I think there is no escaping doing some work in the CLI for you, ponygal. In your text-mode situation, you need to use the "remove" or "rm" command and get rid of something. With your normal user login, when you do

ls

at your home prompt, what do you see? If you say nothing, then I'm going to suggest you go up one directory level, by doing

cd ..

(note the space betwee "cd" and the two dots), and then do

ls

again, and tell me what you see there. If you see files or directories in your home directory that you can delete, then use the "rm" command, as in

rm foo*

to delete the file "foobusters".

Likewise, if you can cd up to the /tmp directory, that is a place you could

sudo rm -rf

which would get rid of everything that is in it. But you need to "sudo" anywhere outside your user folder.

You should only need to delete a relatively few files to get back to a point that your system will boot into a GUI. Once it will boot into a GUI for you, you can pick up with Step 4 above and proceed to reconfigure the system. Try it and let us know how you fare.

[ponygirldefiance]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

i can;t login normally if i do i get just a Konsole window. the only way i can get into the desktop is if i go in the recovery side of kubuntu. how should i work this problem out with this issue?

[Fintan]

Re: not able to login to 7.04

In recovery mode can you login to a gui desktop? If yes why not copy your data to a cd, reformat the linux part of your HD, make a separate /home and /data partition give your root 10gig, leave swap as is, /home 5gig and /data as much as you can. Reinstall a fresh version of your choice and be done with it.