midnight rescue

Right now I’m pulling a midnight– balls out– don’t know if it’ll work or not move.

I’ve given up on trying to fix some major errors that reside in my new linux machine. If it wasn’t clear before… it is now. Ubuntu doesn’t like you switching up the home directories on it.

So where I’m at now is that when I rebooted after an package update my home directory vanished. That’s because the nice os did me a favor and unmounted my partition which my home directory resided. The device was detected in /dev, but it’s mount point in /media wasn’t.

What to do? Oh sure I could mess around in the command prompt trying to find it and mount it.. but it was a temp fix then and it’ll be a temp fix now. So to rescue myself… I’m reinstalling from disk my base system on the other partition and mounting my /home dir on the other partition that I created. What I’m hoping is that the first partition will still remain intact with all the settings and what not and that by reinstalling the base system by disk the config files will recognize my first partition’s /home directory by default…

There’s a risk that won’t happen and I’ll have to say bonviage to all the data and settings there (which for 1 week wasn’t much).

More to come as I go along.

Ubuntu 8.10 get’s released this friday.. If I’m lucky my /home directory was spared.. I can gzip a backup to my external HD and install 8.10 this weekend on my /root partition hopefully bypassing some beginner’s mistakes…

Funny how I’ve done over 8 or 9 Ubuntu installs with no problems (including this Asus Eee I’m blogging from), but when it’s the mother computer- my flag ship– my ‘big bertha’ I go and manage to f-it up.

Silly wabbit linux tricks are for dixs

~J out

***Update*** Wed Oct 29, 7:06

Well what happened was I installed a base system without the xserver which was exciting. So the last thing I did was to install xserver then the ubuntu desktop which took all night.

So this morning I rebooted under a new account name and it booted into the GUI login screen and accepted my new login credentials and put me into a home directory. At first I thought it created the /home into root, except there was a folder “home” next to my user folder. I clicked on it then on the user folder in it and boom.. There was my old profile with everything in it. So the next step is to basically carefully import all my settings from there to me new profile.

The final goal is to have a safe bootable & working /home dir that when I update my distro (or install another one) I can keep using my home dir with all the settings & files. Slowly by slowly I feel more confident that it’s going to work out ok…

Good… yawn.. Times!

~J out

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