Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

fscked up beyond all recognition | 3 Comments

Posted in Linux/Unix on 23rd August 2005, 11:51 pm by

Strange things were afoot this evening when I switched on my laptop. Ubuntu did the intermittant “HAL could not be initialized” error first of all. A quick reboot and everything seemed ok for a couple of minutes. The update indicator was red so I though I ought to do a quick update. As that was processing suddenly it produced a nasty error stating that I needed to run “dpkg –configure -a” manually to set everything straight. Next the terminal wasn’t firing up so I thought I’ll just do a quick reboot.

As the shutdown was happening I saw lots of error messages about readonly filesystem which didn’t look good. Subsequently when I started everything up again the filesystem was screwed. An automated fsck failed and the error message said to run fsck manually without any switches. I logged in as root and ran fsck and then said yes to fixing everything it found. After this was finished I shut down and rebooted only to find that X died straight after login! I tried a few times but no joy so I then rebooted once more. This time everything was ok and I got into the desktop.

I then thought I’d go back to the updates as they were where the trouble had started. I tried to run the updater but I got the same error as before. I then opened up a terminal and ran “dpkg –configure -a”. Next I re-ran the updater and everything went fine. Finally I was back to stability.

The one thing I will say is that all of the messages the operating gave me regarding what was needed to be run manually was sound advice and eventually saved me further recovery attempts.

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  • http://www.enableinteractive.co.uk Nic Rodgers

    …you appreciate backups!

    Just got myself a new Iomega RevDrive, which uses 35GB cartridges and is much faster than backing up to tape. Loving it so far, and the media is under 40 quid a pop.

  • http://atomicpoet.blogspot.com Christopher Trottier

    That sounds like craziness. I wonder what happened. I’ve been running my Slackware box for five months straight, and nothing has happened.

  • http://www.muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Nic – Yes back-ups are a very good idea. All my mail is IMAP so that’s handled (I also sync mail on my windows desktop too), and all the web files I work on are backed up on a USB hard drive, my windows box and the web server itself. Just to cover it!

    @Christopher – It was craziness and I’d quite like to know what the cause was, I should check out the logs. Maybe the issue is hardware related as this laptop is getting on a bit!

GNU screen: open tab in current working directory|(1)

A nice trick for having screen open a new tab in the same directory as the one you’re currently in. To use it add it to your .screenrc

# Open new window in current dir.
bind c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"
bind ^c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"

Hat tip: mteckert on SuperUser.com

Ubuntu: add-apt-repository: command not found|(2)

When you’re using a minimal Ubuntu install if you find the ‘add-apt-repository’ command is missing (it’s useful for adding PPAs and other repositories), then simply run:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

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