Ubuntu Installation :: I Just Hosed My Copy Of Ubuntu Server...any Way To Recover?
Sep 15, 2010
I was installing a package last night and it recompiled my kernel and some other things. I restarted and am getting issues with "mounting none on /dev failed" and "general error mounting filesystems." I tried the three different kernels listed in grub (even the recovery options) and all of them crash in similar manners and the keyboard becomes unresponsive (perhaps because it is a USB keyboard?).
I am using this as a file server and have about 1TB of files. Is there any way to recover/reinstall without having to copy all of the files off and then recopy after a reinstall?
I've been using Linux for a few years and have managed to find what I need searching (including this great site) until now. I have managed to mess up a substantial partition and don't want to possibly make a bad situation worse by bungling around an area I know next to nothing about. I'll try to explain it fully.I finally built a new PC (750GB internal HDD, 4GB RAM). I'm used to Kubuntu so I installed that (10.04 x86_64bit); partitioned sda1 1GB swap / sda2 OS 20GB ext4 / balance sda3 home ext4 for time being. Everything runs sweet. My old PC (very, PIII, but more recent 500GB internal HDD) partitioned sda1 486.31MB swap / sda2 OS 22.82GB ext4 / balance (442.46GB) sda3 home ext3 (ext3 because /home was inherited from an earlier install prior to Kubuntu going ext4). Old PC was having PSU prob. I don't have an external HDD or any other large HDD and not enough DVDRs for 280GB or so of data current in /home. So I backed up what I could risking the old PC working long enough. Got the critical stuff, business etc. There remained some 150GB or so, years of pictures, videos, info on car repairs etc (some but by no means all on semi annual DVDR backups). Free space current in new PC's /home partition ~500GB. So I took out the HDD from the old PC and put it in the new in order to copy the remainder then use it in the new PC; made sure BIOS of new PC indicated this 2nd drive did not have boot priority. The correct install booted.
To my surprise (maybe not yours?) during boot with zero indication, Kubuntu decided to use the 2nd HDD's /home partition for its new 442.46GB swap partition instead! I was horrified. I unmounted it immediately but... according to GParted the partition with all those files to copy is now:/dev/sbd3 File System: unknown 442.46GB Used: --- Unused: --- no flags
I was surprised by kubuntu changing its partitions without input and assuming a ext3 file system on a secondary HD for a 442.46GB swap partition. But, mistake's on me. Call it a lesson. Now I need to know more but don't want to experiment unduly on this drive and possibly make things worse: What should I do next?
I installed Ubuntu 10.04 on a usb stick in persistent install mode. So I could boot the laptop or my desktop computer with the stick, at boot time. Once I needed the 8GB stick for another purposes so I thought about coyping it to my desktop doing from mac os x: dd if=/dev/disks3s of=/Users/jack/Desktop/usb_copy
Now I am trying to do the opposite, after having used the stick, which was formatted to NTFS, just doing
but although I can see that almost of the files are there, I can not boot again. IT is also strange the the file permissions are kind of strange, something like _user
My daughter tried to create a bootable USB-stick version of ubuntu by following the steps on this site, which included using the "universal USB installer" utility from pendrivelinux.com. She was on a windows notebook (I don't know which version, probably XP), and had saved the .iso to the desktop.She's generally pretty good about following directions, but now, with no CD or USB stick in place, the windows machine HD boots directly into the installer "Try ubuntu or Install ubuntu" screen, with no trace of windows! Naturally, her SO (it's his work machine) is more than a little upset.
I did a yum update last night, then rebooted and at boot up I'm left with "GRUB" letters and a blinking underscore...
I am currently reinstalling from the DVD just to reinstall GRUB... at lot of time wasted... just to re-install GRUB.
Let me know how to avoid blowing out GRUB please. I use a dual boot so I install the booter loader to the first sector of my Fedora HD. I don't understand how an update could blow out GRUB running.
I installed OSS audio to try and get a program to quit giving me an error every time i used it. Now the software doesn't error out, but my sound devices aren't recognized anymore. Nothing in the hardware in sound preferences.
Every time my kernel is upgraded (happens often), I reboot and forget to reinstall the VirtualBox guest additions, so my partitions in fstab that use vboxsf (for shared folders) are hosed.
I've been trying to get a copy of VM Ware Server installed on my Ubuntu machine. I tried the Version 2 with the patch available but seeing as I couldn't access the management console due to Firefox I had to abandon that idea. out with installing Version 1.10?
I've been away from computers/Linux for a while so I'm not up on the unix wrangling anymore. So what happened is I started yum extender and it wanted to update. Fine. I let it. I then notice a new kernel is going in so I decide to reboot. I notice different graphics behavior, then I go into my KDE and the graphics are hosed -- as they were when I tried Kubuntu 9.10, which made me come back to my old favorite Fedora. I freak, calm down, reboot (I don't get the old grub? screen offering me kernel boot choices, it just goes into its "ribbon run" at the bottom of the screen) and go into Gnome. Okay, Gnome works -- but no network, i.e., no eth0, i.e., no Internet to come whining to y'all. I then grab the live install disk, get Internet back -- but I don't know how to access the drive or make any changes!
I cry, dry my eyes, try rebooting and banging like a monkey on the keyboard during startup to see if I can get some sort of rescue mode or grub kernel choice list. Yes! After fifth reboot a random pawing of the F keys produces a grub list, I choose 2.6.31.6-145.fc12.i686 and get back to my previous functionality: KDE and Internet work. Culprit is no doubt 2.6.31.6-162.fc12.i686. I would therefore like to know how to boot to the grub manager and get a choice list of kernels to boot
Last night I tried updating from Testing to Sid. Big mistake. Not sure what I did wrong... I changed my repos to sid, and did the usual update / dist-upgrade / autoclean / autoremove. I did not see any significant error messages during the update process. Now, I had fluxbox, gnome and openbox installed. The weird thing is after rebooting I could no longer boot into gnome or openbox as they had merged into something GNOME/Openbox, which was essentially the openbox panel, the nautilus menu on right click, and nothing else. So I purged them both but now when I try to reinstall gnome I get unresolvable dependencies (at least in the sense that both apt-get and aptitude fail to resolve them). fluxbox is still working fine, although it's missing a few things as I was using many gnome apps inside fluxbox.
If anyone else is having problems with their HP Photosmart (c4580) multifunction after the latest updates, here's what I did to get mine working once again -
1. Uninstalled hplip (ALL versions including standard AND packman), this also automatically uninstalls hplip-hpcups (which seems to be the cause of the problems) and automatically re-instates hplip-hpijs instead.
2. Remove all installed printers in Yast and also check on http://localhost:631 to make sure they are all removed.
3. If you have (as I did) lots of annoying test pages spooled and waiting to be printed, reboot now to (hopefully) get rid of them.
4. Disable your firewall (through yast) and add allowed service - cups. You might want to restart it, but to save time/frustrations/headaches/smashing your computer and printer out of frustration I would leave it disabled until you have successfully achieved a test page printout!
5. Download hplip-3.9.6b.run from here - HP Linux Imaging and Printing and follow the install instructions. It should eventually bring up the GUI interface where you can detect your printer.
5a. If it doesn't find your printer in the scan, then you are most likely going to have problems. Make sure your firewall is disabled/allowed and that the printer is actually reachable (ie by ping or the web interface). If still not reachable, then you need to find out your printer's IP address and enter that in a browser and get it's hostname.....
I'm trying to get my secondary display (DVI-Out) working on a laptop (built-in monitor & external display) and I'm afraid I made quite the mess of it installing the proprietary driver only to learn that my old ATI card is no longer supported and having to clean that up and reinstall the original distro driver!Anyways, I reverted back to the open source driver and all is ok. That is until I reboot. If I reboot with the DVI display connected then both displays are brought up in 640x480 res and look terrible.
What do I have to do to be able to leave my DVI display connected when I start up the machine and get it to render the way it does when I plug in the display after the machine is running?I suspect I need to create an xorg.conf file but these fancy modern Linuxes these days don't come with one (or maybe they no longer need it anymore).
I installed Ubuntu 10.10 alongside my Windows 7 installation. The installation was successful, but, now when I try to boot Windows nothing happens (apart from an indefinitely blinking '_'). I tried to do startup repair from my Windows 7 DVD but it is not detecting the hard disk. When I tried to run chkdisk /f from the command prompt it said that the disk is write protected. Later, on using diskpart and list volume the only volume detected is the CD/DVD ROM.
The initial GRUB window points to /dev/sda2 for Windows 7. The Volumes snapshot from Disk Utility is attached!Any idea as to how I can recover Windows 7?
I have xen kernel on a 5.4_64 though it seems to have always done this regardless of version. When I add a virt the control set shows the total machine memory minus what I just allocated to the new virt. This also shows up in the system monitor as total available ram. Problem arises in deleting and making new virts. The memory never reappears as usable after deleting virts. So now after testing several different setups I'm down to 1.4 gigs showing available on the dom0. What can I do to recover this lost memory? I've searched, read, looked every where I could think of and there just doesn't seem to be any information about deleting virts only adding them.
I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11 and a few days later my ecryptfs filesystem began misbehaving in a weird way. In my home directory, many subdirectory names are duplicated verbatim. Here's an ls -F excerpt:
I can no longer access files in those directories (if I ls the directory, it appears empty; I can cd to it, but there's nothing inside). Not all of the directories are duplicated/damaged like this, but most are. A few non-directory files are also duplicated in this fashion, so for example:
so I just installed Ubuntu 10.10 a couple of days ago and used my whole hard drive.Thing is, I decided that although I loved Ubuntu, I stll want to have dual-boot for some cases.. But now that the disks filesystem is not NTFS, Windows cannot regognise the disk as installable and cannot convert the filesystem. Gosh, Windows is a piece of junk, but I still need them for some occasions.
I have tried many methods but still didn't succeed in rebooting Win Vista (blank page after selecting it in boot menu). The main problems were that GRUB was installed also on Windows partition, and Win partition appears as FAT16 and not NTFS Here is the output of boot_info_script, I would say that everything seems OK.
I installed a bunch of updates on one of my 10.04 systems before the holidays and then shutdown. Upon my return the initial boot greeted me with the "low resolution graphics" dialog and no functional mouse or keyboard. I dual booted to 8.04 and replaced /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the contents of the xorg.conf.failsafe in the same directory and rebooted. Got the 800x600 VESA Gnome desktop but still no mouse or keyboard. I tried booting with a different brand mouse (was MS, tried Logitech trackball) but still no good. I have to press the reset button to reboot
It is not a hardware issue as mouse, keyboard and 1920x1200 graphics all work fine when I boot 8.04, 6.06 or Windows 2000. None of the four 10.04 kernels listed in my boot menu makes any difference.
I had a raid 5 + lvm 2 array and lost a disk. While it was recovering the array, the power was down and recovery stopped. When I recovered the power and start the machine the array was unable to start, it was degraded and the states were different between disks. Every disk watched the array in a different way. I put you the states:
Quote:
/dev/sdd1 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 0 8 33 0 active sync /dev/sdc1
[code]....
The first part in /dev/sdc1 is the same for all the devices, I just post you the states. Another thing is tha all the devices say that there is no superblock It seems that 3 disks are "active sync" but the states of the others doesn't match between them. And /dev/sdd1 is spare, the disk I added manually at first to start the recovery process.
I'm trying to recover a compressed mysql backup. As the backup is extremely large, I dont wanna decompress it before importing. How can I make a mysql variable take effect before I load this compressed file into the database.
I have encrypted my home directory during a fresh install, after I booted up for the first time is asked me to write down my /home passkey paraphrase for emergency recovery. I chose to do it later. Now I cant find the command to recover the passkey. Does anyone know how to do this?
before i proceed,I'll like to say that I'm a complete newbie, but enjoying my time with Ubuntu.
Recently, due to hard disk failure, some of the System files got corrupted, I have no idea to which files, but booting Ubuntu from the latest kernel is not working, instead I have to select the previous version from the grub screen.
How to recover these files? Is there a way by which Ubuntu automatically scans and repairs the system files.
I just installed Ubuntu in full installation. But then my Windows 7 file went bye-bye. I tried to see if everything were really erased from my drive. But then it showed that I'm still using 40G out of 250G of my disk. Why is it like that? Can those file still be recovered? My Windows 7 loader was actually erased. Can I still install Windows 7 even if Ubuntu already used the whole drive? And also, how can I delete partitions to make my HDD turn into a whole and single Drive before I install Windows 7?
I downloaded Ubuntu 10.10. Initially, I had the problem on the "Who are You" screen and was told that lower case letters were needed. Long story short, I was given a work-around since there was a partition on my hard drive. Ubuntu installed correctly - works just fine. However, upon booting up, if I choose Windows 7, it takes me to Recovery and wants to reinstall factory specs. What's the best way to resolve this? Is going back to factory specs and then reinstalling Ubuntu a viable option? This is brand new computer and I've downloaded nothing - wanted to make sure everything was working fine before I did that - so I would have no problem with doing that.
So I glossed over the fact that installing Gnome3 from the PPA would break Unity for some reason, and now it's broken, and I can't even check it out. Is there a way to recover it and/or remove Gnome3, or is it a case of being out of luck unless I do a full reinstall?
In a nutshell, our RAID 1 array was rendered broken and we were advised that core lib files were missing and the OS needed to be reloaded... a quote from our server host:"The OS is not healthy.This server will need a reinstall. Libs are missing." This was after having replaced what we though was a faulty /dev/sdb. So they reloaded the OS (Debian 5.0.2 x86_64) on 2 FRESH drives, and installed the old /dev/sda as /dev/sdc once the reload was completed. Here's the output of /etc/fstab on the fresh install so we know what we're working with:
The one problem I see myself running into is /dev/md1 and /dev/md2 are currently in use by the new system, so I cannot mount it there. I should also note, reloading the OS is a viable option if needed as we haven't started configuring the server yet. So if we need to reinstall the OS and assign the NEW RAID arrays to something other than /dev/md1 and /dev/md2 then we can do that.
If I have to overwrite, I don't know if this will be done automatically when re-installing or If the new Ubuntu Server will be stored elsewhere on my HDD.
I only have the core install of US and was planning to build up what I want from there, starting with a GUI. There aren't any other OS's on the HDD and am using a Live CD of an UD.
