Stuck on Login Screen

[UChris]

Hello,
I've just installed 8.04 two days ago, and it was working great until this morning. I turn on my laptop, go through boot screen, get to grub, choose kubuntu, and get the login screen. Great.
Type in my username and password, press enter (as I have every time). Screen goes black for a second (as usual) and then, I get the login screen again. And I get the login screen a hundred times, if I keep entering my password. Any idea how I can get passed this screen and get to my desktop?

(Also, if I put the wrong password in, it tells me login failed, so it is logging me in)

[Snowhog]

Re: Stuck on Login Screen

This is 'generally' an indication that your root filesystem is full. How big is the partition that you setup for Kubuntu? Do you have a separate /home partition, or did you just create one for the system, and one for swap? How big is the hard drive Kubuntu is install on?

You can boot into Recovery Mode (Single User). This will get you a prompt. You will be 'root.' Type:

df -hTxtmpfs

What is shown as Avail for your root ( / ) partition?

[UChris]

Re: Stuck on Login Screen

That's is probably what the issue was, since I was getting some notices that I was running out/had run out of space on my root partition.
Performing the command you've shown, there is 0 Avail on my root partition. I created just one partition for the system and one for swap. The hard drive is 80GB but the Kubuntu partition is only 3GB.
How do I make it use a seperate partition for my /home ?

[Fintan]

Re: Stuck on Login Screen

3gig? that is being very savings orientated.

How much free space is available on that disk?

There are ways of moving /home but you will have to give / more space anyway.

The easiest and cleanest way is to partition the disk with gparted live cd:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

There is plenty of info on partitioning there as well.

Back up your data to a cd, usb whatever or leave the 3gig untouched and deal with it later.

Give:
- / (root) 10-12 gig (format ext3)
- / swap max 1.5 gig
- /home 8-12 gig (format ext3)
- /data as large as you can. If you have windows installed format as fat32 so you can "share" between the two. otherwise use ext3 as well.

Separate (home and /data partitions make a lot of sense, if only for security reasons.

If you left the 3gig partition untouched you can now use a live cd to copy / paste your data over to your new /data partition.

Reinstall using manual partitioning and point your partitions to /, /swap, /home , /data respectively.
Comment: if you have data on the /data partition do not format!!!!

I hope this helps

[UChris]

Re: Stuck on Login Screen

My Windows partition is already formatted as NTFS. Is it possible to reformat it without losing data?

[Fintan]

Re: Stuck on Login Screen

You don't have to touch the windows partition at all!!!!!

NO reformatting will delete your data.

You just have to partition the rest of the disk as above.