Corrupt user profiles?

[Murdoc]

Hi, I've been trying to sort this out for over a week now, on my own and scouring the net/forums. This is what I have:

I dual boot 7.10 with XP on another hdd. One day when booting back up into linux, it wouldn't let me past the login screen. It isn't a wrong pw because when I do that intentionally, it tells me "login failed". When I get it right, the screen goes black for a second, makes the "click" noise of either shutting off or switching modes, and then goes right back to the login screen like nothing happened.

This is what I've tried: I can log in through console from there, but startx does the same thing (blank, click, return).
I can get KDE working by going to Recovery mode, and doing startx from there. This logs me in as root, but of course I don't want to keep doing that. Besides, some things like printing and other USB stuff doesn't work.
As root I created another user profile, and was able to log into there fine while I did more troubleshooting. This worked for a couple of days, then inexplicably now it has the same symptoms as my first account.

Any help is of course appreciated. Ideally I'd like to just get it working again, but failing that I'd like to at least recover all the data, configs, etc. from the profile if I can. I have been considering doing the upgrade to hardy, since I haven't gotten around to that yet, but I don't know if that will fix it, or make it worse, or what. Any ideas? I'm all out.

[Snowhog]

Re: Corrupt user profiles?

Boot into recovery mode. From the prompt, type:

df -hTxtmpfs

This will report on the space usage and availability of your partitions. Look at what is reported under Use% for your root ( / ) and home ( /home ) partitions.

As you say you can login as root from recovery mode and run startx (as root) and "all works as expected" but as root, that implies that your user account (and it's separate /home partition) doesn't have enough space left to work with.

This is what the output of the command shows for my system:

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 ext3 8.0G 2.5G 5.2G 32% /
/dev/sda5 ext3 20G 199M 19G 2% /home
/dev/sda2 ext3 7.9G 3.2G 4.4G 43% /media/sda2
/dev/sda6 ext3 20G 8.0G 11G 43% /media/sda6
/dev/sda3 ext3 7.9G 3.0G 4.5G 40% /media/sda3
/dev/sda7 ext3 20G 2.1G 17G 11% /media/sda7

[Murdoc]

Re: Corrupt user profiles?

Thanks for the help! It's not fixed yet, but maybe we're getting somewhere.

I did as you suggested. The response I got was that my linux partition had 109 GB out of 114 used, yet it said 100% used. This didn't make sense. Still, I went back into root kde, and cleared off a couple gigs of data. Krusader, which had previously been reporting 0 bytes free (despite the fact I could still save data on it), now said 1.9 GB free. Ok, cool. So I try again.

Logging into the new profile worked fine. No problems there. Thanks for the suggestion. Although I still don't know why it reported 100% usage when there was supposedly 5 GB free?

Logging into the old (first) one did not work however. After putting in my password at the login screen, it then kept the blue background of the login screen there, but now brought up a console window over it. (This, incidentally, happened before I had the problem of it just returning me to the login screen so I wasn't too surprised). So I tried a few things there:

I tried startx from there and got the following error:

Xauth: creating new authority file /home/name/.serverauth.5889
X: user not authorized to run Xserver, aborting
Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console.

So next I tried "sudo startx" and got this:

Xauth: creating new authority file /home/name/.serverauth.5911
Fatal Server error:
Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again.

So I moved .X0-lock (I hate deleting things in case I might need them again) somewhere, then tried plain startx again. This is what I got:

Xauth: creating new authority file /home/name/.serverauth.5940
Xauth: /home/name/.Xauthority not writable, changes will be ignored.
Xauth: error in locking authority file /home/name/.Xauthority
Xauth: error in locking authority file /home/name/.Xauthority
Xauth: error in locking authority file /home/name/.Xauthority
X: user not authorized to run Xserver, aborting
Xinit: Server error
Xauth: error in locking authority file /home/name/.Xauthority
Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console.

So I tried sudo startx. This time it looked like it was going to the default bootup screen for kde (which it shouldn't since I have a custom one installed). But only for a second. It then showed, for half a second or so, a generic, bare-bones kde desktop (again, it shouldn't with that profile), but then disappered, when black for a while, then went back to a full-screen console showing the normal starting messages, but no prompt. So I switched to alt-ctrl-1, logged in, and restarted, and am now back using root again. I really hope that I didn't make things worse here with my initiative!

So, any idea what any of this means?

[Snowhog]

Re: Corrupt user profiles?

I think that your messing around with startx as root may have created issues here. The following will result in the loss of personal desktop settings, but it is one of the 'last ditch' efforts to try and get a working user desktop environment back.

Reboot into Recover Mode. At the prompt you will be operating as root. CD into your users home directory. Then rename the hidden .kde folder to say, .kde_OLD using the following command:

mv .kde .kde_OLD

Then CD to return to the root directory and issue a shutdown/reboot command:

shutdown -r now

Keep in mind, that you still need to have recovered usable space on your root ( / ) and home ( /home ) partitions.

[Murdoc]

Re: Corrupt user profiles?

Thanks for the idea. As you say though, I would prefer to do that as a last resort. I'll wait a little longer to see if anyone else has any other ideas I can try first. Anyone?

By the way, with that, do I have to do it at the console, or can I do the renaming from inside the root desktop as well?

[Snowhog]

Re: Corrupt user profiles?

By the way, with that, do I have to do it at the console, or can I do the renaming from inside the root desktop as well?

You can do from inside the root desktop, but you are advised not to. Running as root and making changes to a users /home directory contents isn't recommended. It is safer to do the changes from the CLI.

[Murdoc]

Re: Corrupt user profiles?

Well, I finally did what you suggested and it didn't work. I decided, against logic, to free up even more space on that drive and then finally it started working! I don't know why it was misreporting my drive's free space. Is there a way I can figure out what's wrong there and fix it? Or should that be in another thread?

In any case, thanks for your help. It's nice having a working system again!

[ejt]

Re: Corrupt user profiles?

By the way, with that, do I have to do it at the console, or can I do the renaming from inside the root desktop as well?

You can do from inside the root desktop, but you are advised not to. Running as root and making changes to a users /home directory contents isn't recommended. It is safer to do the changes from the CLI.

What does "CLI" mean, please. Does it mean Command Line Input ?