Ubuntu
gdm package

/home/user not found after update or partial upgrade

Asked by dragonfly

I have Ubuntu Studio Lucid 64 (pre-empt kernel) on a software raid 0 partition (md0). My /home is supposed to be on another raid 0 partition (md1).

I believe that in my tiredness I may have ran a partial upgrade which didn't succeed in loading the latest kernel -30, so I am still on -28. I couldn't boot into my system anymore, so I tried recovery, and chose to repair broken pkgs, (also apt-get clean since I also had a message that my /boot partition was 100% full- which is ok now).
What I can do at this point is to boot into a blank desktop with no access to programs or my files etc....

I get:

ERROR:could not update ICEauthority file /home/user.ICEauthority

nautilus could not create the following required folders
/home/user/Desktop
/home/user/.nautilus
pls. create therse folders or set the permissions such that nautilus can create them.

I worked from TTY console or recovery console and attempted various recommended chown but get message that/home/usr is not found:

"/home/user" "file does not exist"

cat /etc/fstab lists swap files only no / or /home ...Is this normal? If not how can I still be accessing / then? Other Ubuntu versions on same and other computers seem to have / and /home partitions in fstab. Could a partial upgrade that didn't get fully installed mess up fstab?

From terminal and cding to /home and typing:

ls -la
shows only 2 lines with permissions:

drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2008-10-25 07:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 2011-04-05 12:48 ..
            BUT NO LINES SHOWING lost+found
                                                                                            user

The above is not a screenshot obviously, and was borrowed from another working Ubuntu /home directory...

Some posts suggest to remove and re-install nautilus but I beleive I need to fix /home first...For all I know it may have been just a partial update-I was so tired. I did a couple of other things that had changed the permissions, but I didn't rm anything for certain!
Are my home contents lost?
Pls. re-installating the whole distribution is NOT an option, due to a strange multiboot/drive setup that was difficult to achieve, and re-installing home will be tricky with software raid....any solutions???

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dragonfly
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Revision history for this message
dragonfly (streams0dragonflies) said : 		#1

I see that my /home ls -la demo got a little skewed in my above question
so to recap here's is an example of a working /home directory

drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2008-10-25 07:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 2011-04-05 12:48 ..
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 2008-10-25 06:38 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 69 user user 4096 2011-04-15 21:16 user

while my /home at the moment is missing the last 2 lines!!

Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#2

Boot to root recobery mode and run:

chown -R user:user /home/user

You will get a few errors but this is normal, then run:

reboot

Log in as normal and you should be ok

Revision history for this message
dragonfly (streams0dragonflies) said : 		#3

no unfortunately can't do that, as it turns out it replies: "/home/user file not found"

My /home and / are on separate software raid partitions / md0 and /home md1
which are gone from fstab

Someone else advised me to check /proc/partitions and /proc/mounts and to check Disk Utility (DU). I will write again when I find out the state of my raid devices, and see if I am stumped again at that point...

 I know that I have a weird HDD setup with the /boot for this OS that ended up installing on a completely diffrent HD from what I expected it too. My MB had some quirks but up to now all my OS multiboots survived constant updating...

Revision history for this message
dragonfly (streams0dragonflies) said : 		#4

Here is more information:

cat /proc/partitions:

9 1 70711168 md1
9 0 45212544 md0

sudo mdadm --detail/dev/md1
version: 00.90
creation time: ....
raid level: raid 0
Array size: 77.44 Gig 72.41 Gig
raid device: 2
total devices: 2
preferred minor: 1
superblock is persistant
failed devices: 0
state: clean
UUID: 10ab42e0:8df64531:2e110cb:b1cc6cd8
events: 0.1
/dev/sdd7
/dev/sde6

here is only a snippet of the results of:

sudo blkid
...
/dev/md1: label "U Studio L Home" UUID:63626aef-46d0-49cc-83ei-7810029217d2 Type
ext 4
...

Revision history for this message
dragonfly (streams0dragonflies) said : 		#5

Note: /home is also missing from: cat proc/mounts
will also give output of: cat /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf & sudo dpkg --list | grep mdadm if needed.
I figure I may as well ask around a bit since everyone has different experiences with Ubuntu etc... and I'm obviously in a really bad spot being locked out of my /home!!

Revision history for this message
dragonfly (streams0dragonflies) said : 		#6

Adding /home to fstab finally worked:

cat /etc/fstab
 #UUID=63626aef-46d0-49cc-83e1-7810029217d2
 /dev/md1 /home ext4 defaults 0 2
 #UUID=f1a032cc-ec4c-4634-a05f-504ec83a87d5 /media/Ubuntu Multimedi
 ext4 users 0 0
 #UUID=f1a032cc-ec4c-4634-a05f-504ec83a87d5 /media/Ubuntu Multimedi
 ext4 users 0 0
 UUID=25494036-6939-4437-ad67-831238ff03cf swap swap sw 0 0
 UUID=a8263a1a-1b02-4535-a480-3509ac0d1d8b swap swap sw 0 0
 UUID=b628db22-8d88-437e-b09d-0aebd24e4036 /boot ext3 defaults 0 2
 UUID=0465eb55-7de7-4547-bd9d-ccd7fa350185 swap swap sw 0 0

Now my /home mounts again. Turns out that there was a problem with the latest kernel installation: linux-image-2.6.32-30-preempt. As soon as I was back, I had the message of /boot being full (100%) so I followed instructions for that issue, and checked my linux-images in synaptic, which confirmed that last kernel had installed in /boot but failed due to dependancies:

from synaptic error messages:

E: linux-image-2.6.32-30-preempt: subprocess installed
 post-installation script returned error exit status 2
 E: linux-image-preempt: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
 E: linux-preempt: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

 Udate manager: package installation failure:
 E: linux-image-2.6.32-30-preempt: subprocess installed
 post-installation script returned error exit status 2
 E: linux-image-preempt: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
 E: linux-preempt: dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

I then I removed linux-image-2.6.32-30 & 2.6.32-21 & 2.6.32-25 pre-empt kernels (I marked the latter 2 for complete removal) and did:

sudo update-grub

/boot now has space again. but I have to find out how I will either manage to upate the latest kernel eventually or skip to the next kernel update and hope that that one will have no issues installing.